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Books by Professor J. C. Van Dyke 



ART FOR ART'S SAKE. 

University Lectures on the Technical Beauties of 
Painting. With 24 Illustrations. 12mo. $1.50. 

NATURE FOR ITS OWN SAKE. 

First Studies in Natural Appearances. With Por- 
trait. 12mo. $1.50. 

TEXT BOOK OF THE HISTORY OF PAINTING. 
With 110 Illustrations. 12mo. $1.50. 

OLD DUTCH AND FLEMISH MASTERS. 

With Timothy Cole's Wood-engravings. Super- 
royal 8vo. $7.50. 

MODERN FRENCH MASTERS. 

Written by American -Artists and edited by Pro- 
fessor Van Dyke. With 66 full-page Illustrations. 
Super-royal 8vo. $10.00. 



THE DESERT 



THE DESERT 



FURTHER STUDIES IN NATURAL 
APPEARANCES 



BY 
JOHN C. VAN DYKE 



AUTHOR OP " 


NATURE FOR ITS OWN 


SAKE," 




"ART FOR ART'S SAKE," ETC., ETC. 






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NEW YORK 


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CHARLES 


SCRIBNER'S 
1901 


SONS 





THE LIBRARY OF 
CONGRESS, 

Two Cowaa Receiveq 

SEP. 7 1901 

COPVRIflHT ENTRY 

CLASS Q XXc 



COPY 6. 



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Copyright, 1901, bt 
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 



Published September, 1901. 



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TROW OIRECTORY 

PRINTING AND BOOKBINDING COMPANY 

NEW YORK 



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PREFACE-DEDICATION 

Zo 
A. M. 0. 

After the making of Eden came a serpent, 
and after the gorgeons fnrnishing of the world, 
a hnman being. Why the existence of the de- 
stroyers ? What monstrous folly, think you, 
ever led Nature to create her one great enemy 
— man ! Before his coming security may have 
been ; but how soon she learned the meaning of 
fear when this new (Edipus of her brood was 
brought forth ! And how instinctively she 
taught the fear of him to the rest of her chil- 
dren ! To-day, after centuries of association, 
every bird and beast and creeping thing — the 
wolf in the forest, the antelope on the plain, 
the wild fowl in the sedge — fly from his ap- 
proach. They know his civilization means their 
destruction. Even the grizzly, secure in the 
chaparral of his mountain home, flinches as he 
crosses the white man's trail. The boot mark 



Vlll PREFACE-DEDICATION 

in the dust smells of blood and iron. The 
great annihilator has come and fear travels 
with him. 

" Familiar facts," you will say. Yes ; and not 
unfamiliar the knowledge that with the coming 
of civilization the grasses and the wild flowers 
perish, the forest falls and its place is taken 
by brambles, the mountains are blasted in the 
search for minerals, the plains are broken by 
the plow and the soil is gradually washed into 
the rivers. Last of all, when the forests have 
gone the rains cease falling, the streams dry up, 
the ground parches and yields no life, and the 
artificial desert — the desert made by the tramp 
of human feet — begins to show itself, Yes ; 
everyone must have cast a backward glance and 
seen Nature's beauties beaten to ashes under 
the successive marches of civilization. The 
older portions of the earth show their desolation 
plainly enough, and the ascending smoke and 
dust of the ruin have even tainted the air and 
dimmed the sunlight. 

Indeed, I am not speaking figuratively or 
extravagantly. We have often heard of " Sunny 
Italy" or the "clear light" of Egypt, but be- 
lieve me there is no sunlight there compared 
with that which falls upon the upper peaks of 



PREFACE-DEDICATION IX 

the Sierra Madre or the uninhabitable wastes of 
the Colorado Desert. Pure sunlight requires for 
its existence pure air, and the Old World has 
little of it left. When you are in Kome again 
and stand upon that hill where all good roman- 
ticists go at sunset, look out and notice how 
dense is the atmosphere between you and St. 
Peter's dome. That same thick air is all over 
Europe, all around the Mediterranean, even 
over in Mesopotamia and by the banks of the 
Ganges. It has been breathed and burned and 
battle-smoked for ten thousand years. Kide up 
and over the high table-lands of Montana — one 
can still ride there for days without seeing a 
trace of humanity — and how clear and scentless, 
how absolutely intangible that sky-blown sun- 
shot atmosphere ! You breathe it without feel- 
ing it, you see through it a hundred miles and 
the picture is not blurred by it. 

It is just so with Nature's color. True 
enough, there is much rich color at Venice, at 
Cairo, at Constantinople. Its beauty need not 
be denied ; and yet it is an artificial, a chemical 
color, caused by the disintegration of matter — 
the decay of stone, wood, and iron torn from 
the neighboring mountains. It is Nature after 
a poor fashion — Nature subordinated to the will 



PREFACE-DEDICATION 



of man. Once more ride over the enchanted 
mesas of Arizona at sunrise or at sunset, with 
the ragged mountains of Mexico to the south of 
you and the broken spurs of the great sierra 
round about you ; and all the glory of the old 
shall be as nothing to the gold and purple and 
burning crimson of this new world. 

You will not be surprised then if, in speaking 
of desert, mesa and mountain I once more take 
you far beyond the wire fence of civilization to 
those places (unhappily few now) where the 
trail is unbroken and the mountain peak un- 
blazed. I was never over-fond of park and 
garden nature-study. If we would know the 
great truths we must seek them at the source. 
The sandy wastes, the arid lands, the porphyry 
mountain peaks may be thought profitless 
places for pilgrimages ; but how often have you 
and I, and that one we both loved so much, 
found beauty in neglected marshes, in wintry 
forests, and in barren hill-sides ! The love of 
Nature is after all an acquired taste. One be- 
gins by admiring the Hudson-Kiver landscape 
and ends by loving the desolation of Sahara. 
Just why or how the change would be difficult 
to explain. You cannot always dissect a taste 
or a passion. Nor can you pin Nature to a 



PREFACE-DEDICATION XI 

board and chart her beauties with square and 
compasses. One can give his impression and 
but little more. Perhaps I can tell you some- 
thing of what I have seen in these two years of 
wandering; but I shall never be able to tell 
you the grandeur of these mountains, nor the 
glory of color that wraps the burning sands at 
their feet. We shoot arrows at the sun in vain ; 
yet still we shoot. 

And so it is that my book is only an excuse 
for talking about the beautiful things in this 
desert world that stretches down the Pacific 
Coast, and across Arizona and Sonora. The 
desert has gone a-begging for a word of praise 
these many years. It never had a sacred poet ; 
it has in me only a lover. But I trust that you, 
and the nature-loving public you represent, will 
accept this record of the Colorado and the 
Mojave as at least truthful. Given the facts 
perhaps the poet with his fancies will come 

hereafter. 

John C. Van Dyke. 

La Noria Verde 
February, 1901. 



CONTENTS 

Chapter I. The Approach. — Desert mountain ranges 
— Early morning approach — Air illusions — Sand forms — 
The winds — Sun-shafts — Sunlight — Desert life — Ante- 
lope — The Lost Mountains — The ascent — Deer trails — 
Footprints — The stone path — Defensive walls — The sum- 
mit — The fortified camp — Nature's reclamations — The 
mountain dwellers — Invading hosts — Water and food 
supplies — The aborigines — Historic periods — The open 
desert — Perception of beauty — Sense of beauty — Moun- 
tain "view" of the desert — Desert colors — The land of 
fire — Drouth and heat — Sand and gypsum — Sand- whirls — 
Desert storms — Drift of sands — Winter cold in the basin 
— Snow on desert — Sea and sand— Grim desolation — Love 
for the desert — The descent — The Padres in the desert — 
The light of the cross — Aboriginal faith 1 

Chapter II. The Make of the Desert.— The sea of 
sand — Mountain ranges on desert— Plains, valleys, and 
mesas — Effect of drouth — The rains — Harshness of des- 
ert — A gaunt land — Conditions of life — Incessant strife 
— Elemental warfare — Desert vegetation — Protruding 
edges — Shifting sands — Desert winds— Radiation of heat 
— Prevailing winds — Wear of the winds — Erosion of 
mountains — Rock-cutting — Fantastic forms — Wash-outs 
— Sand-lines in caves — Cloud-bursts — Canyon waters — 
Desert floods — Power of water — Water-pockets — No 



XIV CONTENTS 

surface-streams — Oases in the waste — Catch-basins — 
Old sea-beds — Volcanic action — Lava-flows — Geological 
ages — Kinds of rock — Glaciers — Land slips — Movement 
of stones— The talus — Stages of the talus— Desert floors 
— Sandstone blocks — Salt-beds — Sand-beds — Mountain 
vegetation — "Withered grasses — Barren rock — Mountain 
colors — Saw-toothed ridges — Seen from the peaks — The 
Sun-fire kingdom 23 

Chapter III. The Bottom of the Bowl. — Early geo- 
logical days — The former Gulf — Sea-beaches on desert — 
Harbors and reefs — Indian remains — The Cocopas— The 
Colorado River — The delta dam — The inland lake — The 
first fall — Springs and wells in the sea-bed — The New 
River — New beaches — The second fall — The third beach 
— The failing water — Evaporation — Bottom of the Bowl 
— Drying out of the sea-bed — Advance of the desert — Be- 
low sea-level — Desolation of the basin — Beauty of the 
sand-dunes — Cactus and salt-bush — Desert animals — 
Birds— Lizards and snakes — Mirage— The water illusion 
— Decorative landscapes — Sensuous qualities in Nature 
— Changing the desert — Irrigation in the basin — Changing 
the climate — Dry air — Value of the air supply — Value of 
the desert — Destruction of natural beauty — Effects of 
mining, lumbering, agriculture — Ploughing the prairies — 
u . Practical men" — Fighting wind, sand, and heat — Na- 
ture eternal — Return of desolation 44 

Chapter IV. The Silent River. — Rise of the Colora- 
do — In the canyon— On the desert — The lower river — 
Sluggish movement— Stillness of the river — The river's 
name — Its red color — Compared with the Nile — The 
blood hue — River changes — Red sands and silt — River- 
banks — "Bottom" lands— Green bordering bands- 
Bushes and flowers— Soundless water— Wild fowl— Her- 



CONTENTS XV 

ons and bitterns — Snipe — Sadness of bird-life — The for- 
saken shores — Solitude — Beauty of the river — Its maj- 
esty — The delta — Disintegration — The river in flood — 
The " bore" — Meeting of river and sea — The blue tomb 
—Shores of Gulf 63 

Chapter V. Light, Air, and Color. — Popular ideas 
— Sunlight on desert — Glare and heat — Pure sunlight — 
Atmospheric envelope — Vapor particles in air — Clear air 
— Dust particles — Hazes — Seeing the desert air — Sea- 
breezes on desert — Colored air — Different hues — Pro- 
ducing color — Refracted rays — Cold colors, how produced 
— Warm colors — Sky colors — Color produced by dust — 
Effect of heat — Effect of winds — Sand-storms — Reflec- 
tions upon sky — Blue, yellow, and pink hazes — The dust- 
veil — Summer coloring— Local hues — Greens of desert 
plants— Color of the sands— Sands in mirage — Color of 
mountain walls — Weather staining — Influence of the air 
— Peak of Baboquivari — Buttes and spires — Sun-shafts 
through canyons — Complementary hues in shadow — Col- 
ored shadows — Blue shadows upon salt-beds — How light 
makes color — Desert sunsets 77 

Chapter VI. Desert Sky and Clouds. — Common- 
place things of Nature — The blue sky — Changes in the 
blue — Dawns on the desert — Blue as a color— Sky from 
mountain heights — Blackness of space — Bright sky-col- 
ors — Horizon skies — Spectrum colors — Bands of yellow 
— The orange sky — Desert-clouds — Rainfall — Effect of 
the nimbus— Cumuli — Heap-clouds at sunset — Strati — 
Cirri — Ice-clouds— Fire-clouds — The celestial tapestry — 
The desert moon — Rings and rainbows — Moonlight — 
Stars — The midnight sky — Alone in the desert— The mys- 
teries—Space and immensity — The silences — The cry of 
the human 95 



XVI CONTENTS 

Chapter VII. Illusions. — Reality and appearance — 
Preconceived impressions — Deception by sunlight — Dis- 
torted forms and colors — Changed appearance of moun- 
tains — Changes in line and light — False perspective — 
Abnormal foreshortening — Contradictions and denials — 
Deceptive distances— Dangers of the desert — Immensity 
of valley-plains — Shadow illusions — Color-patches on 
mountains — Illusions of lava-beds — Appearance of cloud- 
shadows — Mirage — Need of explanation — Refraction of 
light-rays — Dense air-strata — Illustration of camera-lens 
— Bent light-rays — Ships at sea and upside down — 
Wherein the illusion — " Looming " of vessels, cities, and 
islands — Reversed image of mountains — Horses and cattle 
in mirage — Illusion of rising buttes — Other causes of 
mirage — Water-mirage — The lake appearance — How pro- 
duced — Objects in water — Confused mirage — The swim- 
ming wolf — Colors and shadows in mirage — Trembling 
air — Beauty of mirage 109 

Chapter VIII. Cactus and Grease Wood. — Views of 
Nature — Growth and decay — Nature's plan — The law of 
change — Nature foiling her own plans — Attack and 
drouth — Preservation of species — Means of preservation 
— Maintaining the status quo — The plant-struggle for life 
— Fighting heat and drouth — Prevention of evaporation — 
Absence of large leaves — Exhaust^ of moisture — Gums 
and varnishes of bushes— The ocatilla— Tap roots— Un- 
derground structure— Feeding the top growth— Storage 
reservoirs below ground — Reservoirs above ground — 
Thickened barks — Gathering moisture — Attacks upon des- 
ert plants — Browsing animals — Weapons of defence — 
The spine and thorn — The crucifixion thorn — The sting 
of flowers — Fierceness of the plant— Odors and juices- 
Saps astringent and cathartic— Expenditure of energy — 
The desert covering — Use of desert plants — Their beauty 



CONTENTS XV11 

— Beauty in character — Forms of the yucca and maguey — 
The lluvia d'oro — Grotesque forms — Abnormal colors — 
Blossoms and flowers — Many varieties — Wild flowers — 
Salt-bush — The grasses and lichens — The continuous 
struggle 128 

Chapter IX. Desert Animals. — Meeting desert re- 
quirements — Peculiar desert character — Desert Indians 
— Life without water — Endurance of the jack-rabbit 
— Prairie dogs and water — Water famine — Coyotes 
and wild-cats living without water— Lean, gaunt life — 
Fierceness of animals — Attack and escape — The wild- 
cat — Spring of the cat — Mountain lion — His habits — 
The gray wolf — Home of the wolf — The coyote — His 
cleverness — His subsistence — His background — The fox 
— The prey — Devices for escape — Senses of the rabbit — 
Speed of the jack-rabbit — His endurance — The " cotton- 
tail "—Squirrels and gophers— Desert antelope— His eyes, 
nose, and ears — His swiftness — The mule-deer — Deer 
in flight — White-tailed deer — The reptiles — Defence of 
poison — The fang and sting — The rattlesnake and his 
poison — Spiders and tarantulas— Centipedes and scor- 
pions—Lizards and swifts — The hydrophobia skunk — The 
cutthroat band — The eternal struggle — Brute courage 
and character — Beauty in character— Graceful forms of 
animals — Colors of lizards — Mystery of motion 150 

Chapter X. Winged Life.— First day's walk— Tracks 
in the sand— Scarcity of birds— Dangers of bird-life— No 
cover for protection— Food problem— Heat and drouth 
again— A bird's temperature — Innocent-looking birds — 
The road-runner— Wrens and fly-catchers— Develop- 
ment of special characteristics— Birds of the air— The 
vulture— His hunting and sailing— The southern buzzard 
— The crow — The great condor— Eagles and hawks— Bats 



XV111 CONTENTS 



and owls — The burrowing owl— Ground-birds — The road- 
runner's swiftness — The vicious beak — The desert-quail 
— Wings of the quail — Travelling for water — Habits of 
the quail— His strong legs — Bush-birds — Woodpeckers 
and cactus — Finches and mocking-birds — Humming-birds 
— Doves and grosbeaks — The lark and flickers — Jays and 
magpies — Water fowl — Beetles and worms — Fighting de- 
struction by breed — Blue and green beetles — Butterflies — 
Design and character — Beauty of birds — Beauty also of 
reptiles — Nature's work all purposeful — Precious jewel 
of the toad 174 

Chapter XL Mesas and Foot-Hills. — Flat steps of 
the desert — Across Southern Arizona — Rising from the 
desert — The great mesas — "Grease wood plains" — Up- 
land vegetation — Grass plains — Spring and summer on the 
plains — Home of the antelope — Beds of soda and gypsum 
— Riding into the unexpected — The Grand Canyon 
country — Hills covered with juniper — The Painted Desert 
— Riding on the mesas — The reversion to savagery — The 
thin air again — The light and its deceptions — Distorted 
proportions — Changed colors — The little hills — Painting 
the desert— Worn - down mountains — Mountain wash — 
Flattening down the plain — Mountain making — The foot- 
hills — Forms of the foot-hills — Mountain plants — Bare 
mountains — The southern exposures — Gray lichens — Still 
in the desert — Arida Zona — Cloud-bursts in the mesas — 
Wash of rains— Gorge cutting — In the canyons — Walls 
of rock — Color in canyon shadows — Blue sky — Desert 
landscape — Knowledge of Nature — Nature-lovers — 
Human limitations 194 

Chapter XII. Mountain Barriers. — The western 
mountains — Saddles and passes — View from mountain 
top — Looking toward the peaks — Lost streams — Ava- 



CONTENTS XIX 

lanches and bowlder-beds — Ascent by the arroyo — Growth 
of the stream — Rising banks — Waterfalls — Gorges — As- 
cent by the ridges — The chaparral — Home of the grizzly 
— Ridge trails — Among the live-oaks — Birds and deer — 
Yawning canyons — Canyon streams — Snow — Water wear 
— The pines — Barrancas and escarpments — Under the 
pines — Bushes, ferns, and mosses — Mountain quail — In- 
digo jays — Warblers — The mountain air — The dwarf 
pines — The summit — The look upward at the sky — The 
dark-blue dome — White light — Distant views — The Pa- 
cific — Southern California — The garden in the desert — 
Reclaiming the valleys — Nature's fight against fertility — 
The desert from the mountain top — The great extent of 
desert — The fateful wilderness — All shall perish — The 
death of worlds — The desert the beginning of the end 
— Development through adversity — Sublimity of the 
waste — Desolation and silence — Good-night to the 
desert 213 



THE DESERT 



CHAPTER I 



THE APPROACH 



It is the last considerable group of mountains 
between the divide and the low basin of the 
Colorado desert. For days I have been watch- 
ing them change color at sunset — watching the 
canyons shift into great slashes of blue and 
purple shadow, and the ridges flame with edg- 
ings of glittering fire. They are lonesome look- 
ing mountains lying off there by themselves on 
the plain, so still, so barren, so blazing hot 
under the sun. Forsaken of their kind, one 
might not inappropriately call them the " Lost 
Mountains " — the surviving remnant no doubt 
of some noble range that long centuries ago 
was beaten by wind and rain into desert sand. 
And yet before one gets to them they may prove 
quite formidable heights, with precipitous sides 
and unsurmountable tops. Who knows ? Not 
those with whom I am stopping, for they have 
1 



Desert 
mountains. 



THE DESERT 



Unknown 
ranges. 



Early 
morning on 
the desert. 



Air illu- 
sions. 



not been there. They do not even know the 
name of them. The Papagoes leave them alone 
because there is no game in them. Evidently 
they are considered unimportant hills, no- 
body's hills, no man's range ; but nevertheless 
I am off for them in the morning at daylight. 

I ride away through the thin mesquite and 
the little adobe ranch house is soon lost to view. 
The morning is still and perfectly clear. The 
stars have gone out, the moon is looking pale, 
the deep blue is warming, the sky is lightening 
with the coming day. How cool and crystalline 
the air ! In a few hours the great plain will be 
almost like a fiery furnace under the rays of 
the summer sun, but now it is chilly. And in 
a few hours there will be rings and bands and 
scarves of heat set wavering across the waste 
upon the opalescent wings of the mirage ; but 
now the air is so clear that one can see the 
breaks in the rocky face of the mountain 
range, though it is fully twenty miles away. 
It may be further. "Who of the desert has not 
spent his day riding at a mountain and never 
even reaching its base ? This is a land of illu- 
sions and thin air. The vision is so cleared at 
times that the truth itself is deceptive. But I 
shall ride on for several hours. If, by twelve 



THE APPKOACH 



3 



o'clock, the foot hills are not reached, I shall 
turn back. 

The summer heat has withered everything 
except the mesquite, the palo verde,* the 
grease wood, and the various cacti. Under foot 
there is a little dry grass, but more often 
patches of bare gravel and sand rolled in shal- 
low beds that course toward the large valleys. 
In the draws and flat places the fine sand lies 
thicker, is tossed in wave forms by the wind, 
and banked high against clumps of cholla or 
prickly pear. In the wash-outs and over the 
cut banks of the arroyos it is sometimes heaped 
in mounds and crests like driven snow. It 
blows here along the boundary line between 
Arizona and Sonora almost every day ; and the 
tailing of the sands behind the bushes shows 
that the prevailing winds are from the Gulf 
region. A cool wind ? Yes, but only by com- 
parison with the north wind. When you feel 
it on your face you may think it the breath of 
some distant volcano. 

How pale -blue the Lost Mountains look 
under the growing light. I am watching their 
edges develop into broken barriers of rock, and 

* The use of Spanish names is compulsory. There are 
no English equivalents. 



Hand 
forms in 
the valleyi 



Winds of 
the desert. 



THE DESERT 



Sun shafts. 



The beauty 
of sunlight. 



even as I watch the tallest tower of all is struck 
with a bright fawn color. It is the high point 
to catch the first shaft of the sun. Quickly the 
light spreads downward until the whole ridge is 
tinged by it, and the abrupt sides of porphyry 
begin to glow under it. It is not long before 
great shafts of light alternating with shadow 
stretch down the plain ahead of me. The sun 
is streaming through the tops of the eastern 
mountains and the sharp pointed pinnacles are 
cutting shadows in the broad beam of light. 

That beam of light ! Was there ever any- 
thing so beautiful ! How it flashes its color 
through shadow, how it gilds the tops of the 
mountains and gleams white on the dunes of 
the desert ! In any land what is there more 
glorious than sunlight ! Even here in the 
desert, where it falls fierce and hot as a rain of 
meteors, it is the one supreme beauty to which 
all things pay allegiance. The beast and the 
bird are not too fond of its heat and as soon as 
the sun is high in the heavens they seek cover 
in the canyons ; but for all that the chief glory 
of the desert is its broad blaze of omnipresent 
light. 

Yes, there is animal and bird life here though 
it is not always apparent unless you look for it. 



THE APPROACH 



Wrens and linnets are building nests in the 
cholla, and finches are singing from the top of 
the sahuaro.* There are plenty of reptiles, 
rabbits and ground squirrels quietly slipping 
out of your way ; and now that the sun is up 
you can see a long sun-burned slant-of-hair 
trotting up yonder divide and casting an appre- 
hensive head from side to side as he moves off. 
It is not often that the old gray wolf shows 
himself to the traveller. He is usually up in 
the mountains before sunrise. And seldom 
now does one see the desert antelope along the 
mesas, and yet off to the south you can see 
patches of white that come and go almost like 
flashing mirrors in the sun. They are stragglers 
from some band that have drifted up from cen- 
tral Sonora. No ; they are not far away. A 
little mirage is already forming over that portion 
of the mesa and makes them look more distant 
than they are in reality. You can be deceived 
on the desert by the nearness of things quite as 
often as by their remoteness. 

These desert mountains have a fashion of ap- 
pearing distant until you are almost up to them. 
Then they seem to give up the game of decep- 
tion and come out of their hiding-places. It is 
* Properly Saguaro. 



Desert life. 



Antelope. 



The Lost 
Mountains. 



THE DESEET 



Mountain 
walls. 



The ascent. 



Deer trails. 



just so with the mountains toward which I am 
riding. After several hours they seem to rise 
up suddenly in front of me and I am at their 
base. They are not high — perhaps fifteen 
hundred feet. The side near me is precipitous 
rock, weather-stained to a reddish-black. A 
ride around the bases discloses an almost com- 
plete perpendicular wall, slanting off half way 
down the sides into sloping beds of bowlders 
that have been shaken loose from the upper 
strata. A huge cleft in the western side — half 
barranca half canyon — seems to suggest a way 
to the summit. 

The walking up the mountain is not the best 
in the world. It is over splintered rock, step- 
ping from stone to stone, creeping along the 
backbone of bowlders, and worrying over rows 
of granite blocks. Presently the course seems 
to slip into a diagonal — a winding up and 
around the mountain — and ahead of me the 
stones begin to look peculiar, almost familiar. 
There seems to be a trail over the ledges and 
through the broken blocks ; but what should 
make a trail up that deserted mountain ? 
Mule-deer travelling toward the summit to lie 
down in the heat of the day ? It is possible. 
The track of a band of deer soon becomes a 



THE APPROACH 



beaten path, and animals are just as fond of 
a good path as humanity . By a strange coin- 
cidence at this very moment the sharp-toed 
print of a deer's hoof appears in the ground 
before me. But it looks a little odd. The im- 
pression is so clear cut that I stoop to examine 
it. It is with no little astonishment that I find 
it sunk in stone instead of earth — petrified in 
rock and overrun with silica. The bare sug- 
gestion gives one pause. How many thousands 
of years ago was that impression stamped upon 
the stone ? By what strange chance has it 
survived destruction ? And while it remains 
quite perfect to-day — the vagrant hoof -mark of 
a desert deer — what has become of the once 
carefully guarded footprints of the Sargons, 
the Pharaohs and the Caesars ? "With what 
contempt Nature sometimes plans the survival 
of the least fit, and breaks the conqueror on his 
shield ! 

Further up the mountain the deer-trail theory 
is abandoned — at least so far as recent times are 
concerned. The stones are worn too smooth, 
the larger ones have been pushed aside by 
something more intelligent than a mule-deer's 
hoof ; and in one place the trail seems to have 
been built up on the descending side. There is 



Footprints. 



The stone 
path. 



8 



THE DESERT 



Following 
the trail. 



Defensive 
walls. 



The 

summit. 



not the slightest evidence, either by rub upon 
the rocks, or overturned stones, or scrape in 
the gravel, that any living thing has passed up 
this pathway for many years ; and yet the trail 
is a distinct line of lighter colored stone stretch- 
ing ahead of me. It is a path worn in the 
rocks, and there is no grass or vine or weed to 
obliterate it. It leads on and up to the saddle 
of the mountain. There is a crevasse or chasm 
breaking through this saddle which might have 
been bridged at one time with mesquite trunks, 
but is now to be leaped if one would reach the 
summit. It is narrow only in one place and 
this is just where the trail happens to run. 
Across it, on the upper side, there is a horse- 
shoe shaped enclosure of stone. It is only 
a few feet in diameter, and the upper layers of 
stone have fallen ; but the little wall still stands 
as high as one's waist. Could this have been 
a sentinel box used to guard the passage of the 
trail at this place ? 

Higher and still higher until at last the 
mountain broadens into a flat top. I am so 
eager to gain the height and am expecting so 
much that at first I overlook what is before me. 
Gradually I make out a long parapet of loose 
stone on the trail side of the mountain which 



THE APPROACH 



9 



joins on to steep cliffs on the other sides. A 
conclusion is instantly jumped at, for the im- 
agination will not make haste slowly under such 
circumstances. These are the ruins of a once 
fortified camp. 

I wander about the flat top of the mountain 
and slowly there grows into recognizable form a 
great rectangle enclosed by large stones placed 
about two feet apart. There is no doubt about 
the square and in one corner of it there seems 
an elevated mound covered with high-piled 
stones that would indicate a place for burials. 
But not a trace of pottery or arrow-heads ; and 
about the stones only faint signs of fire which 
might have come from volcanic action as readily 
as from domestic hearths. Upon the side of 
one of the large rocks are some characters in 
red ochre ; and on the ground near a pot-hole 
in the rock, something that the imagination 
might torture into a rude pestle for grinding 
maize. 

The traces of human activity are slight. Nat- 
ure has been wearing them away and reclaim- 
ing her own on the mountain top. Grease 
wood is growing where once a floor was beaten 
hard as iron by human feet ; out of the burial 
mound rises a giant sajiuaro whose branching 



The fortified 
camp. 



Nature's 
reclama- 
tions. 



10 



THE DESERT 



Mountain 
dwellers. 



Invading 
hosts. 



arms give the look of the cross ; and beside 
the sahuaro rests a tall yucca with four feet of 
clustering bellflowers swinging from its top. 

And who were they who built these stonewalls, 
these primitive entrenchments ? When and 
where did they come from and what brought 
them here ? The hands that executed this 
rough work were certainly untrained. Indians ? 
Very likely. Perhaps some small band that had 
taken up a natural defence in the mountains 
because too feeble in numbers to fight in the 
open. Here from this lookout they could watch 
the country for a hundred miles around. Here 
the scouts could see far away the thin string of 
foemen winding snake-like over the ridges of 
the desert, could see them grow in size and 
count their numbers, could look down upon 
them at the foot of the mountain and yell back 
defiance to the challenge coming up the steep 
sides. Brave indeed the invaders that would 
pluck the eagles from that eerie nest ! Climb- 
ing a hill against a shower of arrows, spears, 
and bowlders is to fight at a terrible disad- 
vantage. 

Starve them out ? Yes ; but the ones at the 
bottom would starve as quickly as those at the 
top. Cut off their water supply ? Yes ; but 



THE APPROACH 



11 



where did either besieged or besieger get water? 
If there was ever a spring in the mountain it 
long ago dried up, for there is no trace of it to- 
day. Possibly the mountain-dwellers knew of 
some arroyo where by digging in the sand they 
could get water. And possibly they carried 
it in ollas up the stone trail to their mountain 
home where they stored it in the rocks against 
the wrath of a siege to come. No doubt they 
took thought for trouble, and being native to 
the desert they could stand privation better 
than their enemies. 

How long ago did that aboriginal band come 
trailing over these trackless deserts to find and 
make a home in a barren mountain standing 
in a bed of sand ? "Who can tell ? A geologist 
might make the remains of their fort an il- 
lustration of the Stone Age and talk of un- 
known centuries ; an iconoclast might claim 
that it was merely a Mexican corral built to 
hide stolen horses ; but a plain person of the 
southwest would say that it was an old Indian 
camp. The builders of the fortification and the 
rectangle worked with stone because there was 
no other material. The man of the Stone Age 
exists to-day contemporary with civilized man. 
Possibly he always did. And it may be that 



Water and 
food sup- 
plies. 



The abo- 
rigines. 



12 



THE DESERT 



Historic 
periods. 



The open 
desert. 



Perception 
of beauty. 



some day Science will conclude that historic 
periods do not invariably happen, that there is 
not always a sequential evolution, and that the 
white race does not necessarily require a flat- 
headed mass of stupidity for an ancestor. 

But what brought them to seek a dwelling 
place in the desert ? Were they driven out from 
the more fertile tracts ? Perhaps. Did they 
find this a country where game was plentiful 
and the conditions of life comparatively easy ? 
It is possible. Or was it that they loved the 
open country, the hot sun, the treeless wastes, 
the great stretches of mesa, plain and valley ? 
Ah ; that is more than likely. Mankind has 
always loved the open plains. He is like an 
antelope and wishes to see about him in all di- 
rections. Perhaps, too, he was born with a pre- 
dilection for "the view," but that is no easy 
matter to prove. It is sometimes assumed that 
humanity had naturally a sense and a feeling 
for the beautiful because the primitives deco- 
rated pottery and carved war-clubs and totem- 
posts. Again perhaps ; but from war-clubs and 
totem-posts to sunsets and mountain shadows 
— the love of the beautiful in nature — is a very 
long hark. The peons and Indians in Sonora 
cannot see the pinks and purples in the moun- 



THE APPROACH 



13 



tain shadows at sunset. They are astonished at 
your question for they see nothing but moun- 
tains. And you may vainly exhaust ingenuity 
trying to make a Pagago see the silvery sheen 
of the mesquite when the low sun is streaming 
across its tops. He sees only mesquite — the 
same dull mesquite through which he has 
chased rabbits from infancy. 

No ; it is not likely that the tribe ever chose 
this abiding place for its scenery. A sensitive 
feeling for sound, or form, or color, an impres- 
sionable nervous organization, do not belong to 
the man with the hoe, much less to the man 
with the bow. It is to be feared that they are 
indicative of some physical degeneration, some 
decline in bone and muscle, some abnormal 
development of the emotional nature. They 
travel side by side with high civilization and 
are the premonitory symptoms of racial decay. 
But are we correct in assuming that because 
the red man does not see a colored shadow 
therefore he is blind to every charm and sub- 
limity of nature ? 

These mountain-dwellers, always looking out 
from their height, must have seen and re- 
marked the large features of the desert — the 
great masses of form, the broad blocks of color. 



Sense of 
beauty. 



Mountain 
''■view." 



14 



THE DESERT 



The desert 
colors. 



Looking 
down to the 
desert. 



They knew the long undulations of the valley- 
plain were covered with sharp, broken rock, but 
from this height surely they must have noticed 
how soft as velvet they looked, how smoothly 
they rolled from one into another, how perfect- 
ly they curved, how symmetrically they waved. 
And the long lines of the divides, lessening to 
the west — their ridges of grease wood showing 
a peculiar green like the crests of sea-waves 
in storm — did they not see them ? Did they 
not look down on the low neighboring hills and 
know that they were pink, terra-cotta, orange- 
colored — all the strange hues that may be com- 
pounded of clay and mineral — with here and 
there a crowning mass of white quartz or a far- 
extending outcrop of shale stained blue and 
green with copper ? Doubtless, a wealth of 
color and atmospheric effect was wasted upon 
the aboriginal retina ; but did it not take note 
of the deep orange sunsets, the golden fringed 
heaps of cumulus, and the tongues of fire that 
curled from every little cirrus cloud that lin- 
gered in the western sky ? 

And how often they must have looked out 
and down to the great basin of the desert where 
cloud and sky, mountain and mesa, seemed to 
dissolve into a pink mist ! It was not an un- 



THE APPROACH 



15 



known land to them and yet it had its terrors. 
Tradition told that the Evil Spirit dwelt there, 
and it was his hot breath that came np every 
morning on the wind, scorching and burning 
the brown faces of the mountain-dwellers ! 
Fire ! — he dwelt in fire. Whence came all the 
fierce glow of sunset down over that desert if it 
was not the reflection from his dwelling place ? 
The very mountain peaks flared red at times, 
and in the old days there were rivers of fire. 
The petrified waves and eddies of those rivers 
were still visible in the lava streams. Were 
there not also great flames beneath the sands 
that threw up hot water and boiled great vol- 
canoes of mud ? And along the base of many 
a cliff were there not jets of steam and smoke 
blown out from the heart of the mountains ? 

It was a land of fire. ~No food, no grass, no 
water. There were places in the canyons where 
occasionally a little stream was found forcing 
itself up through the rock; but frequently it 
was salt or, worse yet, poisoned with copper or 
arsenic. How often the tribe had lost from its 
numbers — slain by the heat and drought in 
that waste ! More than once the bodies had 
been found by crossing bands and always the 
same tale was told. The victims were half 



The land of 
fire. 



Drought 
and heat. 



16 



THE DESEKT 



Desert 
mystery. 



Sand and 
gypsum. 



whirls. 



buried in sand, not decayed, but withered like 
the grass on the lomas. 

Mystery — a mystery as luminous and yet as 
impenetrable as its own mirage — seemed always 
hanging over that low-lying waste. It was a 
vast pit dug under the mountain bases. The 
mountains themselves were bare crags of fire in 
the sunlight, and the sands of the pit grew 
only cactus and grease wood. There were tracts 
where nothing at all grew — miles upon miles of 
absolute waste with the pony's feet breaking 
through an alkaline crust. And again, there 
were dry lakes covered with silt ; and vast beds 
of sand and gypsum, white as snow and fine as 
dust. The pony's feet plunged in and came 
out leaving no trail. The surface smoothed over 
as though it were water. Fifty miles away one 
could see the desert sand-whirls moving slowly 
over the beds in tall columns two thousand 
feet high and shining like shafts of marble in 
the sunlight. How majestically they moved, 
their feet upon earth, their heads towering 
into the sky ! 

And then the desert winds that raised at 
times such furious clouds of sand ! All the 
air shone like gold dust and the sun turned 
red as blood. Ah ! what a stifling sulphureous 



THE APPROACH 



17 



air ! Even on the mountain tops that heavy 
air could be felt, and down in the desert itself 
the driving particles of sand cut the face and 
hands like blizzard-snow. The ponies could 
not be made to face it. They turned their 
backs to the wind and hung their heads be- 
tween their fore feet. And how that wind 
roared and whistled through the thin grease 
wood ! The scrubby growths leaned and bent 
in the blast, the sand piled high on the trunks ; 
and nothing but the enormous tap-roots kept 
them from being wrenched from the earth. 

And danger always followed the high winds. 
They blew the sands in clouds that drifted full 
and destroyed the trails. In a single night 
they would cover up a water hole, and in a few 
days fill in an arroyo where water could be got 
by digging. The sands drove like breakers on 
a beach, washing and wearing everything up 
to the bases of the mountains. And the fine 
sand reached still higher. It whirled up the 
canyons and across the saddles, it eddied around 
the enormous taluses, it even flung itself upon 
the face walls of the mountain and left the 
smoothing marks of its fingers upon the sharp 
pinnacles of the peak. 

It was in winter when the winds were fiercest. 



Desert 
storms. 



Drift of 



18 



THE DESERT 



Winter cold. 



Snow on 
desert. 



Sea and 
sand. 



With them at times came a sharp cold, the 
more biting for the thin dry air of the desert. 
All the warmth seemed blown out of the basin 
with a breath, and its place filled by a storm- 
wind from the north that sent the condor 
wheeling down the blast and made the coyote 
shiver on the hill. How was it possible that 
such a furnace could grow so cold ! And once 
or more each winter, when the sky darkened 
with clouds, there was a fall of snow that for 
an hour or so whitened the desert mountains 
and then passed away. At those times the 
springs were frozen, the high sierras were 
snow-bound, and down in the desert it seemed 
as though a great frost-sheet had been let down 
from above. The brown skins for all their 
deer-hide clothing were red with cold, and the 
breath blown from the pony's nostrils was 
white as smoke. 

A waste of intense heat and cold, of drouth 
and cloud-bursts, of winds and lightning, of 
storm and death, what could make any race of 
hunters or band of red men care for it ? What 
was the attraction, wherein the fascination ? 
How often have we wondered why the sailor 
loves the sea, why the Bedouin loves the sand ! 
What is there but a strip of sky and another 



THE APPROACH 



19 



strip of sand or water ? But there is a sim- 
plicity about large masses — simplicity in 
breadth, space and distance — that is inviting 
and ennobling. And there is something very 
restful about the horizontal line. Things that 
lie flat are at peace and the mind grows peace- 
ful with them. Furthermore, the waste places 
of the earth, the barren deserts, the tracts for- 
saken of men and given over to loneliness, have 
a peculiar attraction of their own. The weird 
solitude, the great silence, the grim desolation, 
are the very things with which every desert 
wanderer eventually falls in love. You think 
that very strange perhaps ? Well, the beauty 
of the ugly was sometime a paradox, but to-day 
people admit its truth ; and the grandeur of 
the desolate is just as paradoxical, yet the 
desert gives it proof. 

But the sun-tanned people who lived on this 
mountain top never gave thought to masses, 
or horizontal lines, or paradoxes. They lived 
here, it may be from necessity at first, and then 
stayed on because they loved the open wind- 
blown country, the shining orange-hued sands, 
the sweeping mesas, the great swing of the 
horizontal circle, the flat desolation, the un- 
broken solitude. Nor ever knew why they 



Grim des- 
olation. 



Love for 
the desert. 



20 



THE DESEET 



The descent. 



The Padres. 



loved it. They were content and that was 
enough. 

What finally became of them ? Who knows ? 
One by one they passed away, or perhaps were 
all slaughtered in a night by the fierce band 
newly come to numbers called the Apaches. 
This stone wall stands as their monument, but 
it tells no date or tale of death. As I descend 
the trail of stone the fancy keeps harping on 
the countless times the bare feet must have 
rubbed those blocks of syenite and porphyry 
to wear them so smooth. Have there been no 
others to clamber up these stairs of stone ? 
What of the Padres — were they not here ? 
As I ride off across the plain to the east the 
thought is of the heroism, the self-abnega- 
tion, the undying faith of those followers of 
Loyola and Xavier who came into this waste so 
many years ago. How idle seem all the specious 
tales of Jesuitism and priestcraft. The Padres 
were men of soul, unshrinking faith, and a per- 
severance almost unparalleled in the annals of 
history. The accomplishments of Columbus, 
of Cortez, of Coronado were great ; but what 
of those who first ventured out upon these sands 
and erected missions almost in the heart of the 
desert, who single-handed coped with dangers 



THE APPROACH 



21 



from man and nature, and who lived and died 
without the slightest hope of reward here on 
earth ? Has not the sign of the cross cast more 
men in heroic mould than ever the glitter of 
the crown or the flash of the sword ? 

And thinking such thoughts I turn to take a 
final view of the mountain ; and there on the 
fortified top something rears itself against the 
sky like the cross-hilt of a sword. It is the 
giant sahuaro with its rising arms, and beside 
it the cream-white bloom of the yucca shining 
in the sunlight seems like a lamp illuminating 
it. The good Padres have gone and their mis- 
sion churches are crumbling back to the earth 
from which they were made ; but the light of 
the cross still shines along the borders of this 
desert land. The flame, that through them the 
Spirit kindled, still burns ; and in every Indian 
village, in every Mexican adobe, you will see on 
the wall the wooden or grass-woven cross. On 
the high hills and at the cross-roads it stands, 
roughly hewn from mesquite and planted in a 
cone of stones. It is now always weather-stained 
and sun-cracked, but still the sign before which 
the peon and the Indian bow the head and whis- 
per words of prayer. The dwellers beside the 
desert have cherished what the inhabitants of 



Light of 
the cross. 



Aboriginal 
faith. 



THE DESEKT 



the fertile plains have thrown away. They and 
their forefathers have never known civilization, 
and never suffered from the blight of doubt. 
Of a simple nature, they have lived in a simple 
way, close to their mother earth, beside the 
desert they loved, and (let us believe it !) nearer 
to the God they worshipped. 



CHAPTER II 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



The first going -down into the desert is 
always something of a surprise. The fancy 
has pictured one thing ; the reality shows quite 
another thing. Where and how did we gain 
the idea that the desert was merely a sea of 
sand ? Did it come from that geography of our 
youth with the illustration of the sand-storm, 
the flying camel, and the over-excited Bedouin ? 
Or have we been reading strange tales told by 
travellers of perfervid imagination — the Marco 
Polos of to-day ? There is, to be sure, some 
modicum of truth even in the statement that 
misleads. There are " seas " or lakes or ponds 
of sand on every desert ; but they are not so 
vast, not so oceanic, that you ever lose sight of 
the land. 

What land ? Why, the mountains. The 
desert is traversed by many mountain ranges, 
some of them long, some short, some low, and 
some rising upward ten thousand feet. They 



Sea of sand. 



Mountain 
ranges <m 
the desert. 



24 



THE DESERT 



Plains, val- 
leys, and 
mesas. 



Effect of 
drought. 



are always circling yon with a ragged horizon, 
dark-hued, bare-faced, barren — just as trnly 
desert as the sands which were washed down 
from them. Between the ranges there are 
wide-expanding plains or valleys. The most 
arid portions of the desert lie in the basins of 
these great valleys — flat spaces that were once 
the beds of lakes, but are now dried out and 
left perhaps with an alkaline deposit that pre- 
vents vegetation. Through these valleys run 
arroyos or dry stream- beds — shallow channels 
where gravel and rocks are rolled during cloud- 
bursts and where sands drift with every wind. 
At times the valleys are more diversified, that is, 
broken by benches of land called mesas, dotted 
with small groups of hills called lomas, crossed 
by long stratified faces of rock called escarp- 
ments. 

With these large features of landscape com- 
mon to all countries, how does the desert differ 
from any other land ? Only in the matter of 
water — the lack of it. If Southern France 
should receive no more than two inches of rain 
a year for twenty years it would, at the end of 
that time, look very like the Sahara, and the 
flashing Ehone would resemble the sluggish 
yellow Nile. If the Adirondack region in New 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



25 



York were comparatively rainless for the same 
length of time we should have something like 
the Mojave Desert, with the Hudson changed 
into the red Colorado. The conformations of 
the lands are not widely different, but their 
surface appearances are as unlike as it is pos- 
sible to imagine. 

For the whole face of a land is changed by 
the rains. With them come meadow-grasses 
and flowers, hillside vines and bushes, fields of 
yellow grain, orchards of pink-white blossoms. 
Along the mountain sides they grow the forests 
of blue-green pine, on the peaks they put white 
caps of snow ; and in the valleys they gather 
their waste waters into shining rivers and flash- 
ing lakes. This is the very sheen and sparkle 
— the witchery — of landscape which lend allure- 
ment to such countries as New England, France, 
or Austria, and make them livable and lovable 
lands. 

But the desert has none of these charms. 
Nor is it a livable place. There is not a thing 
about it that is " pretty," and not a spot upon 
it that is "picturesque" in any Berkshire- Val- 
ley sense. The shadows of foliage, the drift of 
clouds, the fall of rain upon leaves, the sound 
of running waters — all the gentler qualities of 



The effect of 
rains. 



Harshness 
of the desert. 



26 



THE DESERT 



A gaunt 
land. 



Conditions 
of life. 



nature that minor poets love to juggle with — 
are missing on the desert. It is stern, harsh, 
and at first repellent. But what tongue shall 
tell the majesty of it, the eternal strength of it, 
the poetry of its wide-spread chaos, the sub- 
limity of its lonely desolation ! And who shall 
paint the splendor of its light; and from the 
rising up of the sun to the going down of the 
moon over the iron mountains, the glory of its 
wondrous coloring ! It is a gaunt land of 
splintered peaks, torn valleys, and hot skies. 
And at every step there is the suggestion of the 
fierce, the defiant, the defensive. Everything 
within its borders seems fighting to maintain 
itself against destroying forces. There is a war 
of elements and a struggle for existence going 
on here that for ferocity is unparalleled else- 
where in nature. 

The feeling of fierceness grows upon you as 
you come to know the desert better. The sun- 
shafts are falling in a burning shower upon 
rock and dune, the winds blowing with the 
breath of far-off fires are withering the bushes 
and the grasses, the sands drifting higher and 
higher are burying the trees and reaching up as 
though they would overwhelm the mountains, 
the cloud-bursts are rushing down the moun- 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



27 



tain's side and through the torn arroyos as 
though they would wash the earth into the sea. 
The life, too, on the desert is peculiarly savage. 
It is a show of teeth in bush and beast and 
reptile. At every turn one feels the presence of 
the barb and thorn, the jaw and paw, the beak 
and talon, the sting and the poison thereof. 
Even the harmless Gila monster flattens his 
body on a rock and hisses a "Don't step on 
me." There is no living in concord or brother- 
hood here. Everything is at war with its 
neighbor, and the conflict is unceasing. 

Yet this conflict is not so obvious on the face 
of things. You hear no clash or crash or snarl. 
The desert is overwhelmingly silent. There 
is not a sound to be heard ; and not a thing 
moves save the wind and the sands. But you 
look up at the worn peaks and the jagged bar- 
rancas, you look down at the wash-outs and 
piled bowlders, you look about at the wind- 
tossed, half -starved bushes ; and, for all the 
silence, you know that there is a struggle for 
life, a war for place, going on day by day. 

How is it possible under such conditions for 
much vegetation to flourish ? The grasses are 
scanty, the grease wood and cactus grow in 
patches, the mesquite crops out only along the 



The inces- 
sant 
struggle. 



Elemental 
war/are. 



Desert 
vegetation. 



28 



THE DESERT 



Protruding 
edges. 



Shifting 



dry river-beds. All told there is hardly enough 
covering to hide the anatomy of the earth. 
And the winds are always blowing it aside. 
You have noticed how bare and bony the hills 
of New England are in winter when the trees 
are leafless and the grasses are dead ? You have 
seen the rocks loom up harsh and sharp, the 
ledges assume angles, and the backbone and ribs 
of the open field crop out of the soil ? The 
desert is not unlike that all the year round. 
To be sure there are snow-like driftings of sand 
that muffle certain edges. Valleys, hills, and 
even mountains are turned into rounded lines 
by it at times. But the drift rolled high in 
one place was cut out from some other place ; 
and always there are vertebra showing — elbows 
and shoulders protruding through the yellow 
byssus of sand. 

The shifting sands ! Slowly they move, wave 
upon wave, drift upon drift ; but by day and 
by night they gather, gather, gather. They 
overwhelm, they bury, they destroy, and then 
a spirit of restlessness seizes them and they 
move off elsewhere, swirl upon swirl, line upon 
line, in serpentine windings that enfold some 
new growth or fill in some new valley in the 
waste. So it happens that the surface of the 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



desert is far from being a permanent affair. 
There is hardly enough vegetation to hold the 
sands in place. With little or no restraint upon 
them they are transported hither and yon at 
the mercy of the winds. 

Yet the desert winds hardly blow where they 
list. They follow certain channels or " draws " 
through the mountain ranges ; and the reason 
for their doing so is plain enough. During the 
day the intense heat of the desert, meeting with 
only a thin dry air above it, rises rapidly sky- 
ward leaving a vast vacuum below that must be 
filled with a colder air from without. This 
colder air on the southern portion of the Colo- 
rado Desert comes in from the Gulf region. 
One can feel it in the passes of the mountains 
about Baboquivari, rushing up toward the 
heated portions of Arizona around Tucson. 
And the hotter the day the stronger the inward 
rush of the wind. Some days it will blow at 
the rate of fifty miles an hour until sunset, and 
then with a cessation of radiation the wind 
stops and the night is still. 

On the western portions of the Colorado the 
wind comes from the Pacific across Southern 
California. The hot air from the desert goes 
up and out over the Coast Range, reaching sea- 



Desert 

winds. 



Radiation 
of heat. 



30 



THE DESEKT 



Prevailing 
winds. 



Wear of 
the winds. 



ward. How far out it goes is unknown, but 
when it has cooled off it descends and flows 
back toward the land as the daily sea-breeze. 
It re-enters the desert through such loop holes 
in the Coast Eange as the San Gorgonio Pass — 
the old Puerta de San Carlos — above Indio. 
The rush of it through that pass is quite vio- 
lent at times. For wind is very much like 
water and seeks the least obstructed way. Its 
goal is usually the hottest and the lowest place 
on the desert — such a place, for example, as 
Salton, though I am not prepared to point out 
the exact spot on the desert that the winds 
choose as a target. On the Mojave Desert at 
the north their action is similar, though there 
they draw down from the Mount Whitney re- 
gion as well as from the Pacific. 

In open places these desert winds are some- 
times terrific in force though usually they are 
moderate and blow with steadiness from certain 
directions. As you feel them softly blowing 
against your cheek it is hard to imagine that they 
have any sharp edge to them. Yet about you 
on every side is abundant evidence of their 
works. The sculptor's sand-blast works swifter 
but not surer. Granite and porphyry cannot 
withstand them, and in time they even cut 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



31 



through the glassy surface of lava. Their wear 
is not here nor there, but all over, everywhere. 
The edge of the wind is always against the stone. 
Continually there is the slow erosion of canyon, 
crag, and peak ; forever there is a gnawing at 
the bases and along the face-walls of the great 
sierras. Grain by grain, the vast foundations, 
the beetling escarpments, the high domes in air 
are crumbled away and drifted into the valleys. 
Nature heaved up these mountains at one time 
to fulfil a purpose : she is now taking them 
down to fulfil another purpose. If she has 
not water to work with here as elsewhere she is 
not baffled of her purpose. Wind and sand an- 
swer quite as well. 

But the cutting of the wind is not always 
even or uniform, owing to the inequalities in 
the fibre of rock ; and often odd effects are pro- 
duced by the softer pieces of rock wearing away 
first and leaving the harder section exposed to 
view. Frequently these remainders take on 
fantastic shapes and are likened to things hu- 
man, such as faces, heads, and hands. In the 
San Gorgonio Pass the rock-cuttings are in 
parallel lines, and occasionally a row of gar- 
nets in the rock will make the jewel-pointed 
fingers of a hand protruding from the parent 



Erosion of 
mountains. 



Rock- 
cutting. 



THE DESEET 



Fantastic 
forms. 



Wash-outs. 



Sand-lines 
in caves. 



body.* Again shafts of hard granite may make 
tall spires and turrets upon a mountain peak, a 
vein of quartz may bulge out in a white or yel- 
low or rose-colored band ; and a ridge of black 
lava, reaching down the side of a foot-hill, may 
creep and heave like the backbone of an enor- 
mous dragon. 

Perhaps the greatest erosion is in the passes 
through which the winds rush into the desert. 
Here they not only eat into the ledges and cut 
away the rock faces, but they make great wash- 
outs in the desert itself. These trenches look 
in every respect as though caused by water. In 
fact the effects of wind and water are often so 
inextricably mixed that not even an expert geol- 
ogist would be able to say where the one leaves 
off and the other begins. The shallow caves of 
the mountains — too high up for any wave action 
from sea or lake, and too deep to be reached 
by rains — have all the rounded appearance of 
water-worn receptacles. One can almost see 
the water-lines upon the walls. Bnt the sand- 
heaped floor suggests that the agent of erosion 
was the wind. 

Yes ; there is some water on the deserts, some 

* Professor Blake of the University of Arizona has 
called my attention to this. 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



33 



rainfall each year. Even Sahara gets its occa- 
sional showers, and the Colorado and the Mo- 
jave show many traces of the cloud-burst. The 
dark thunder-clouds that occasionally gather 
over the desert seem at times to reserve all their 
stores of rain for one place. The fall is usually 
short-lived but violent ; and its greatest force 
is always on the mountains. There is no sod, 
no moss, to check or retard the flood ; and the 
result is a great rush of water to the low places. 
In the canyons the swollen streams roll down 
bowlders that weigh tons, and in the ravines 
many a huge barranca is formed in a single 
hour by these rushing waters. On the lomas 
and sloping valleys they are not less destructive, 
running in swift streams down the hollows, and 
whirling stones, sand, and torn bushes into the 
old river-beds. 

In a very short time there is a great torrent 
pouring down the valley — a torrent composed 
of water, sand, and gravel in about equal parts. 
It is a yellow, thick stream that has nothing but 
disaster for the man or beast that seeks to swim 
it. Many a life has been lost there. The great 
onset of the water destroys anything like buoy- 
ancy, and the tendency is to drag down and 
roll the swimmer like a bowlder. Even the 



Cloud- 
bursts. 



Canyon 
streams. 



Detert 

floods. 



34 



THE DESEET 



Power of 
water. 



Water- 
pockets. 



No running 
streams. 



enormous strength of the grizzly bear has been 
known to fail him in these desert rivers. They 
boil and seethe as though they were hot ; and 
they rush on against banks, ripping out the 
long roots of mesquite, and swirling away tons 
of undermined gravel as though it were only so 
much snow. At last after miles of this mill- 
racing the force begins to diminish, the streams 
reach the flat lake-beds and spread into broad, 
thin sheets ; and soon they have totally van- 
ished, leaving scarce a rack behind. 

The desert rainfall comes quickly and goes 
quickly. The sands drink it up, and it sinks 
to the rock strata, where, following the ledges, it 
is finally shelved into some gravel-bed. There, 
perhaps a hundred feet under the sand, it slow- 
ly oozes away to the river or the Gulf. There 
is none of it remains upon the surface except 
perhaps a pool caught in a clay basin, or a 
catch of water in a rocky bowl of some canyon. 
Occasionally one meets with a little stream 
where a fissure in the rock and a pressure from 
below forces up some of the water ; but these 
springs are of very rare occurrence. And they 
always seem a little strange. A brook that ran 
on the top of the ground would be an anomaly 
here ; and after one lives many months on the 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



35 



desert and returns to a well- watered country, 
the last thing he becomes accustomed to is the 
sight of running water. 

In every desert there are isolated places 
where water stands in pools, fed by under- 
ground springs, where mesquite and palms 
grow, and where there is a show of coarse 
grass over some acres. These are the so-called 
oases in the waste that travellers have pictured 
as Gardens of Paradise, and poets have used 
for centuries as illustrations of happiness sur- 
rounded by despair. To tell the truth they 
are wretched little mud-holes ; and yet because 
of their few trees and their pockets of yellow 
brackish water they have an appearance of un- 
reality. They are strange because bright-green 
foliage and moisture of any kind seem out of 
place on the desert. 

Yet surely there was plenty of water here at 
one time. Everywhere you meet with the dry 
lake-bed — its flat surface devoid of life and of- 
ten glimmering white with salt. These beds 
are no doubt of recent origin geologically, and 
were never more than the catch-basins of sur- 
face water ; but long before ever they were 
brought forth the whole area of the desert 
was under the sea. To-day one may find on 



Oases in the 
waste. 



Catch- 
basins. 



36 



THE DESEKT 



Old sea- 
beds. 



Volcanic 
action. 



Lava 
streams. 



the high, tahle-lands sea-shells in abundance. 
The petrified clams are precisely like the live 
clams that one picks np on the western coast 
of Mexico. The corals, barnacles, dried sponge 
forms, and cellular rocks do not differ from 
those in the Gulf of California. The change 
from sea to shore, and from shore to table-land 
and mountain, no doubt took place very slow- 
ly. Just how many centuries ago who shall 
say ? Geologists may guess and laymen may 
doubt, but the Keeper of the Seals says noth- 
ing. 

Nor is it known just when the porphyry 
mountains were roasted to a dark wine-red, 
and the foot-hills burnt to a terra-cotta orange. 
Fire has been at work here as well as wind 
and water. The whole country has a burnt 
and scorched look proceeding from something 
more fiery than sunlight. Volcanoes have left 
their traces everywhere. You can still see the 
streams of lava that have chilled as they ran. 
The blackened cones with their craters exist ; 
and about them, for many miles, there are 
great lakes and streams of reddish-black lava, 
frozen in swirls and pools, cracked like glass, 
broken into blocks like a ruined pavement. 
Wherever you go on the desert you meet with 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



37 



chips and breaks of lava, showing that at one 
time there must have been quantities of it 
belched out of the volcanoes. 

There were convulsions in those days when 
the sea washed close to the bases of the moun- 
tains. Through the crevasses and fissures in the 
rocks the water crept into the fires of the earth, 
and explosions — volcanic eruptions — were the 
result. Wandering over these stony tracks you 
might fancy that all strata and all geological 
ages were blown into discord by those explo- 
sions. For here are many kinds of splintered 
and twisted rocks — rocks aqueous and igne- 
ous, gritstones, conglomerates, shales, slates, 
syenite, basalt. And everywhere the white 
coatings of carbonate of lime that look as 
though they were run hot from a puddling fur- 
nace ; and the dust of sulphur, copper, and 
iron blown upon granite as though oxidized by 
fire. 

The evidence for glaciers is not so convinc- 
ing. There is no apparent sign of an ice age. 
Occasionally one sees scratches upon mountain 
walls that are suspicious, or heaps of sand and 
gravel that look as though pushed into the 
small valleys by some huge force. And again 
there are places on the Mojave where windrows 



Geological 
ages. 



Kinds of 
rock. 



Glaciers. 



38 



THE DESERT 



Land slips. 



Movement 
of stones. 



Ttte talus. 



of heavy bowlders are piled on either side of 
mountain water- courses, looking as though ice 
may have caused their peculiar placing. But 
there is no certainty about any of these. Land 
slips may have made the windrows as easily as 
ice slips ; and water can heap mounds of sand 
and gravel as readily as glaciers. One cannot 
trace the geological ages with such facility. 
Things sometimes "just happen," in spite of 
scientific theories. 

Besides, the movement of the stones into the 
valleys is going on continuously, irrespective of 
glaciers. They are first broken from the peaks 
by erosion, and then they fall into what is called 
a talus— a great slope of stone blocks beginning 
half way down the mountain and often reaching 
to the base or foot. Many of them, of course, 
are rolled over steep declivities into the canyons 
and thence carried down by flood waters ; but 
the talus is the more uniform method for bowl- 
ders reaching the plain. 

In the first stage of the talus the blocks are 
ragged-edged and as large as a barrel. Nothing 
whatever grows upon the slope. It is as bare as 
the side of a volcanic crater. And just as diffi- 
cult to walk over. The talus is added to at the 
top by the falling rock of the face-wall, and it 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



39 



is losing at the bottom by the under blocks 
grinding away to stone and gravel. The flat- 
tening out at the bottom, the breaking up of 
the blocks, and the push-out of the mountain 
foot upon the plain is the second stage of the 
talus. In almost all the large valleys of the 
desert the depressed talus extends, sometimes 
miles in length, out from the foot of the moun- 
tain range. When it finally slips down into the 
valley and becomes a flat floor it has entered 
upon its third and last stage. It is then the 
ordinary valley-bed covered with its cactus and 
cut by its arroyos. Yet this valley-floor instead 
of being just one thing is really many things — 
or rather made up of many different materials 
and showing many different surfaces. 

You may spend days and weeks studying the 
make-up of these desert-floors. Beyond Yuma 
on the Colorado there are thousands of acres of 
mosaic pavement, made from tiny blocks of 
jasper, carnelian, agate — a pavement of pebbles 
so hard that a horse's hoof will make no im- 
pression upon it — wind-swept, clean, compact 
as though pressed down by a roller. One can 
imagine it made by the winds that have cut 
and drifted away the light sands and allowed 
the pebbles to settle close together until they 



Stages of 
the talus. 



Desert- 
floors. 



40 



THE DESERT 



Sandstone 
blocks. 



Salt beds. 



Sand-beds. 



have become wedged in a solid surface. For no 
known reason other portions of the desert are 
covered with blocks of red-incrusted sandstone 
— the incrustation being only above the sand- 
line. In the lake-beds there is usually a surface 
of fine silt. It is not a hard surface though it 
often has a crust upon it that a wildcat can 
walk upon, but a horse or a man would pound 
through as easily as through crusted snow. 
The salt-beds are of sporadic appearance and 
hardly count as normal features of the desert. 
They are often quite beautiful in appearance. 
The one on the Colorado near Salton is hard as 
ice, white, and after sunset it often turns blue, 
yellow, or crimson, dependent upon the sky 
overhead which it reflects. Borax and gypsum- 
beds are even scarcer than the salt-beds. They 
are also white and often very brilliant reflectors 
of the sky. The sand-beds are, of course, more 
frequently met with than any others ; and yet 
your horse does not go knee-deep in sand for 
any great distance. It is too light, and is 
drifted too easily by the winds. Bowlders, 
gravel, and general mountain wash is the most 
common flooring of all. 

The mountains whence all the wash comes, 
are mere ranges of rock. In the canyons, where 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



41 



there is perhaps some underground water, there 
are occasionally found trees and large bushes, 
and the very high sierras have forests of pine 
belted about their tops ; but usually the desert 
ranges are barren. They never bore fruit. The 
washings from them are grit and fry of rock 
but no vegetable mould. The black dirt that 
lies a foot or more in depth upon the surface of 
the eastern prairies, showing the many years 
accumulations of decayed grasses and weeds, is 
not known anywhere on the desert. The slight 
vegetation that grows never has a chance to turn 
into mould. And besides, nothing ever rots or 
decays in these sands. Iron will not rust, nor 
tin tarnish, nor flesh mortify. The grass and 
the shrub wither and are finally cut into pieces 
by flying sands. Sometimes you may see small 
particles of grass or twigs heaped about an ant- 
hill, or find them a part of a bird's nest in a 
cholla ; but usually they turn to dry dust and 
blow with the wind — at the wind's will. 

The desert mountains gathered in clusters 
along the waste, how old and wrinkled, how set 
and determined they look ! Somehow they 
remind you of a clinched hand with the 
knuckles turned skyward. They have strength 
and bulk, the suggestion of quiescent force. 



Mountain 
vegetation. 



Withered 
grasses. 



42 



THE DESERT 



Barren 
rock. 



Mountain 
colors. 



Saw-toothed 
ridges. 



Barren rock and nothing more ; but what could 
better epitomize power ! The heave of the 
enormous ridge, the loom of the domed top, 
the bulk and body of the whole are colossal. 
Rising as they do from flat sands they give the 
impression of things deep-based — veritable isl- 
ands of porphyry bent upward from a yellow 
sea. They are so weather-stained, so worn, 
that they are not bright in coloring. Usually 
they assume a dull garnet-red, or the red of 
peroxide of iron ; but occasionally at sunset 
they warm in color and look fire-red through 
the pink haze. 

The more abrupt ranges that appear younger 
because of their saw-toothed ridges and broken 
peaks, are often much finer in coloring. They 
have needles that are lifted skyward like Mos- 
lem minarets or cathedral spires ; and at even- 
ing, if there is a yellow light, they shine like 
brazen spear-points set against the sky. It is 
astonishing that dull rock can disclose such 
marvellous coloring. The coloring is not local 
in the rock, nor yet again entirely reflected. 
Desert atmosphere, with which we shall have to 
reckon hereafter, has much to do with it. 

And whether at sunset, at sunrise, or at mid- 
night, how like watch-towers these mountains 



THE MAKE OF THE DESERT 



43 



stand above the waste ! One can almost fancy 
that behind each dome and rampart there are 
cloud-like Genii — spirits of the desert — keeping 
guard over this kingdom of the sun. And what 
a far-reaching kingdom they watch ! Plain upon 
plain leads up and out to the horizon — far as the 
eye can see — in undulations of gray and gold ; 
ridge upon ridge melts into the blue of the 
distant sky in lines of lilac and purple ; fold 
upon fold over the mesas the hot air drops its 
veilings of opal and topaz. Yes ; it is the 
kingdom of sun-fire. For every color in the 
scale is attuned to the key of flame, every air- 
wave comes with the breath of flame, every 
sunbeam falls as a shaft of flame. There is 
no questioning who is sovereign in these do- 
minions. 



Seen from 
the peaks. 



Sun-fire 
kingdom. 



CHAPTER III 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



geological 



The former 
Gulf. 



In the ancient days when the shore of the 
Pacific was young, when the white sierras had 
only recently been heaved npward and the des- 
ert itself was in a formative stage, the ocean 
reached much farther inland than at the pres- 
ent time. It pushed through many a pass and 
flooded many a depression in the sands, as its 
wave-marks upon granite bases and its numer- 
ous beaches still bear witness. In those days 
that portion of the Colorado Desert known as 
the Salton Basin did not exist. The Gulf of 
California extended as far north as the San 
Bernardino Range and as far west as the Pass 
of San Gorgonio. Its waters stood deep where 
now lies the road-bed of the Southern Pacific 
railway, and all the country from Indio almost 
to the Colorado River was a blue sea. The 
Bowl was full. No one knew if it had a bot- 
tom or imagined that it would ever be emptied 
of water and given over to the drifting sands. 
44 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



45 



No doubt the tenure of the sea in this Salton 
Basin was of long duration. The sand-dunes 
still standing along the northern shore — fifty 
feet high and shining like hills of chalk — 
were not made in a month ; nor was the long 
shelving beach beneath them — still covered 
with sea-shells and pebbles and looking as 
though washed by the waves only yesterday — 
formed in a day. Both dunes and beach are 
plainly visible winding across the desert for 
many miles. The southwestern shore, stretch- 
ing under a spur of the Coast Range, shows the 
same formation in its beach -line. The old 
bays and lagoons that led inland from the sea, 
the river-beds that brought down the surface 
waters from the mountains, the inlets and nat- 
ural harbors are all in place. Some of them 
are drifted half full of sand, but they have not 
lost their identity. And out in the sea-bed 
still stand masses of cellular rock, honeycombed 
and water-worn (and now for many years wind- 
worn), showing the places where once rose the 
reefs of the ancient sea. 

These are the only records that tell of the 
sea's occupation. The Indians have no tra- 
dition about it. Yet when the sea was there 
the Indian tribes were there also. Along the 



Sea-beaches 
on desert. 



Harbors 
and reefs. 



46 



THE DESERT 



Indian 
remains. 



The 
Cocopas. 



The 

Colorado 

River. 



bases of the San Bernardino and San Jacinto 
Ranges there are indications of cave-dwelling, 
rock-built squares that doubtless were fortified 
camps, heaps of stone that might have been 
burial-mounds. Everywhere along the ancient 
shores and beaches you pick up pieces of pot- 
tery, broken ollas, stone pestels and mortars, 
axe - heads, obsidian arrow - heads, flint spear- 
points, agate beads. There is not the slightest 
doubt that the shores were inhabited. It was 
a warm nook, accessible to the mountains and 
the Pacific ; in fact, just the place where 
tribes would naturally gather. Branches of 
the Yuma Indians, like the Cocopas, overran 
all this country when the Padres first crossed 
the desert ; and it was probably their fore- 
fathers who lived by the shores of this Upper 
Gulf. No doubt they were fishermen, traders 
and fighters, like their modern representatives 
on Tiburon Island ; and no doubt they fished 
and fought and were happy by the shores of 
the mountain-locked sea. 

But there came a time when there was a dis- 
turbance of the existing conditions in the Up- 
per Gulf. Century after century the Colorado 
River had been carrying down to the sea its 
burden of sedimental sand and silt. It had 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



47 



been entering the Gulf far down on the eastern 
side at an acnte angle. Gradually its deposits 
had been building up, banking up ; and grad- 
ually the river had been pushing them out and 
across the Gulf in a southwesterly direction. 
Finally there was formed a delta dam stretch- 
ing from shore to shore. The tides no longer 
brought water up and around the bases of the 
big mountains. Communication with the sea 
was cut off and what was once the top of the 
Gulf changed into an inland lake. It now had 
no water supply from below, it lay under a 
burning sun, and day by day evaporation car- 
ried it away. 

No one knows how many days, how many 
years, elapsed before the decrease of the water 
became noticeable. Doubtless the lake shrunk 
away slowly from the white face of the sand- 
dunes and the red walls of the mountains. 
The river-mouths that opened into the lake 
narrowed themselves to small stream - beds. 
The shelving beaches where the waves had 
fallen lazily year after year, pushing themselves 
over the sand in beautiful water-mirrors, shone 
bare and dry in the sunlight. The ragged 
reefs, over which the chop sea had tumbled 
and tossed so long, lifted their black hulks out 



The delta 



The inland 
lake. 



48 



THE DESEET 



The first 
fall. 



Springs 
and wells in 
the sea-bed. 



The New 
River. 



of the water and with their hosts of barnacles 
and sea-life became a part of the land. 

The waters of the great inland lake fell per- 
haps a hundred feet and then they made a pause. 
The exposed shores dried out. They baked hard 
in the sun, and were slowly ground down to sand 
and powdered silt by the action of the winds. 
The waters made a long pause. They were re- 
ceiving reinforcements from some source. Pos- 
sibly there was more rainfall in those days than 
now, and the streams entering the lake from 
the mountains were much larger. Again there 
may have been underground springs. There 
are flowing wells to-day in this old sea-bed — 
wells that cast up water Salter than the sea it- 
self. No one knows their fountain-head. Per- 
haps by underground channels the water creeps 
through from the Gulf, or comes from mountain 
reservoirs and turns saline by passing through 
beds of salt. These are the might-bes ; but it 
is far more probable that the Colorado Eiver at 
high water had made a breach of some kind in 
the dam of its own construction and had poured 
overflow water into the lake by way of a dry 
channel called the New River. The bed of this 
river runs northward from below the boundary- 
line of Lower California ; and in 1893, during 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



49 



a rise in the Colorado, the waters rushed in and 
flooded the whole of what is called the Sal ton 
Basin. When the Colorado receded, the basin 
soon dried out again. 

It was undoubtedly some accident of this 
kind that called the halt in the original reces- 
sion. During the interim the lake had time to 
form new shores where the waves pounded and 
washed on the gravel as before until miles upon 
miles of new beach — pebbled, shelled, and slop- 
ing downward with great uniformity — came into 
existence. This secondary beach is intact to- 
day and looks precisely like the primary except 
that it is not quite so large. Across the basin, 
along the southern mountains, the second water- 
tracery is almost as apparent as the first. The 
rocks are eaten in long lines by wave-action, 
and are honeycombed by the ceaseless energies 
of the zoophite. 

Nor was the change in beach and rock alone. 
New bays and harbors were cut out from where 
the sea had been, new river - channels were 
opened down to the shrunken lake, new lagoons 
were spread over the flat places. Nature evi- 
dently made a great effort to repair the damage 
and adapt the lake to its new conditions. And 
the Indians, too, accepted the change. There 



New 
beaches. 



The second 
fall. 



50 



THE DESERT 



The third 
beach. 



The failing 
water. 



are many indications in broken pottery, arrow- 
heads, and mortars that the aboriginal tribes 
moved down to the new beach and built wick- 
iups by the diminished waters. And the old 
fishing-f or aging-fighting life was probably re- 
sumed. 

Then once more the waters went down, down, 
down. Step by step they receded until the sec- 
ondary beach was left a hundred feet above the 
water level. Again there was a pause. Again 
new beaches were beaten into shape by the 
waves, new bays were opened, new arroyos cut 
through from above. The whole process of 
shore-making — the fitting of the land to the 
shrunken proportions of the lake — was gone 
through with for the third time ; while the 
water supply from the river or elsewhere was 
maintained in decreased volume but with some 
steadiness of flow. Possibly the third halt of 
the receding water was not for a great length of 
time. The tertiary beach is not so large as its 
predecessors. There never was any strong wave- 
action upon it, its pebbles are few, its faults 
and breaks are many. The water supply was 
failing, and finally it ceased altogether. 

What fate for a lake in the desert receiving 
no supplies from river or sea — what fate save 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



51 



annihilation ? The hot breath of the wind blew 
across the cramped water and whipped its sur- 
face into little waves ; and as each tiny point 
of spray rose on the crest and was lifted into 
the air the fiery sunbeam caught it, and in a 
twinkling had evaporated and carried it up- 
ward. Day by day this process went on over 
the whole surface until there was no more sea. 
The hollow reefs rose high and dark above the 
bed, the flat shoals of silt lifted out of the ooze, 
and down in the lowest pools there was the 
rush and plunge of monster tortuabas, sharks 
and porpoises, caught as it were in a net and 
vainly struggling to get out. How strange must 
have seemed that landscape when the low ridges 
were shining with the slime of the sea, when 
the beds were strewn with algce, sponges, and 
coral, and the shores were whitening with salt ! 
How strange, indeed, must have been the first 
sight of the Bottom of the Bowl ! 

But the sun never relaxed its fierce heat nor 
the wind its hot breath. They scorched and 
burned the silt of the sea-bed until it baked 
and cracked into blocks. Then began the wear 
of the winds upon the broken edges until the 
blocks were reduced to dry fine powder. Fi- 
nally the desert came in. Drifts upon drifts of 



Evapo- 
ration. 



Bottom of 
the Bowl. 



Drying out 
of the sea- 
led. 



52 



THE DESEET 



Advance of 
desert. 



Below 
sea-level. 



Desolation 
of the basin. 



sand blown through the valleys settled in the 
empty basin; gravel and bowlder-wash came 
down from the mountains ; the grease wood, 
the salt-bush, and the so-called pepper-grass 
sprang up in isolated spots. Slowly the desert 
fastened itself upon the basin. Its heat became 
too intense to allow the falling rain to reach 
the earth, its surface was too salt and alkaline 
to allow of much vegetation, it could support 
neither animal nor bird life ; it became more 
deserted than the desert itself. 

And thus it remains to this day. When you 
are in the bottom of it you are nearly three 
hundred feet below the level of the sea. Cir- 
cling about you to the north, south, and west 
are sierras, some of them over ten thousand feet 
in height. These form the Rim of the Bowl. 
And off to the southwest there is a side broken 
out of the Bowl through which you can pass 
to the river and the Gulf. The basin is perhaps 
the hottest place to be found anywhere on the 
American deserts. And it is also the most for- 
saken. The bottom itself is, for the great part 
of it, as flat as a table. It looks like a great 
plain leading up and out to the horizon — a 
plain that has been ploughed and rolled smooth. 
The soil is drifted silt — the deposits made by 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



53 



the washings from the mountains — and is 
almost as fine as flour. 

The long line of dunes at the north are just 
as desolate, yet they are wonderfully beautiful. 
The desert sand is finer than snow, and its 
curves and arches, as it builds its succession of 
drifts out and over an arroyo, are as graceful as 
the lines of running water. The dunes are al- 
ways rhythmical and flowing in their forms ; 
and for color the desert has nothing that sur- 
passes them. In the early morning, before the 
sun is up, they are air-blue, reflecting the sky 
overhead ; at noon they are pale lines of daz- 
zling orange-colored light, waving and undulat- 
ing in the heated air ; at sunset they are often 
flooded with a rose or mauve color ; under a 
blue moonlight they shine white as icebergs in 
the northern seas. 

But neither the dunes nor the flats grow 
vegetation of consequence. About the high 
edges, up near the mountain slopes, you find 
growths of mesquite, palo verde, and cactus ; 
but down in the basin there are many miles 
where no weed or grass breaks the level uni- 
formity. Not even the salt-bush will grow in 
some of the areas. And this is not due to 
poverty of soil but to absence of water and 



Beauty of 
the sand- 
dunes. 



Cactus and 
salt-busk. 



54 



THE DESERT 



Desert 
animals in 
the basin. 



Birds. 



Lizards 
and snakes. 



intense heat. Plants cannot live by sunlight 
alone. 

Nor will the desert animals inhabit an abso- 
lute waste. The coyote and the wildcat do not 
relish life in this dip in the earth. They care 
little for heat and drouth, but the question of 
food appeals to them. There is nothing to eat. 
Even the abstemious jack-rabbit finds living 
here something of a difficulty. Many kinds of 
tracks are found in the uncrusted silt — tracks 
of coyotes, gray wolves, sometimes mountain 
lions — but they all run in straight trails, show- 
ing the animals to be crossing the basin to the 
mountains, not prowling or hunting. So, too, 
you will occasionally find birds — linnets, bobo- 
links, mocking-birds, larks — but they are seen 
one at a time, and they look weary-like land 
birds far out at sea that seek a resting-place on 
passing vessels. They do not belong to the 
desert and are only stopping there temporarily 
on some long flight. Snakes and lizards are not 
particular about their abiding-place, and yet 
they do not care to live in a land where there 
is no bush or stone to creep under. You meet 
with them very seldom. Practically there is no 
life of any kind that is native to the place. 

Is there any beauty, other than the dunes, 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



55 



down in this hollow of the desert ? Yes. 
From a picturesque point of view it has the 
most wonderful light, air, and color imaginable. 
You will not think so until you see them 
blended in that strange illusion known as 
mirage. And here is the one place in all the 
world where the water-mirage appears to per- 
fection. It does not show well over grassy or 
bushy ground, but over the flat lake-beds of the 
desert its appearance is astonishing. Down in 
the basin it is accompanied by a second illusion 
that makes the first more convincing. You 
are below sea-level, but instead of the ground 
about you sloping up and out, it apparently 
slopes down and away on every side. You are 
in the centre of a disk or high point of ground, 
and around the circumference of the disk is 
water — palpable, almost tangible, water. It 
cannot be seen well from your horse, and fifty 
feet up on a mountain side it would not be 
visible at all. But dismount and you see it 
better ; kneel down and place your cheek to the 
ground and now the water seems to creep up to 
you. You could throw a stone into it. The 
shore where the waves lap is just before you. 
But where is the horizon-line ? Odd enough, 
this vast circling sea does not always know a 



Mirage. 



The water 
illusion. 



56 



THE DESERT 



Decorative 
landscapes. 



Sensuous 
qualities in 
nature. 



horizon ; it sometimes reaches up and blends 
into the sky without any point of demarcation. 
Through the heated air you see faint outlines of 
mountains, dim glimpses of foot-hills, sugges- 
tions of distance ; but no more. Across them 
is drawn the wavering veil of air, and the red 
earth at your feet, the blue sky overhead, are 
but bordering bands of flat color. 

And there you have the most decorative land- 
scape in the world, a landscape all color, a dream 
landscape. Painters for years have been trying 
to put it upon canvas — this landscape of color, 
light, and air, with form almost obliterated, 
merely suggested, given only as a hint of the 
mysterious. Men like Corot and Monet have 
told us, again and again, that in painting, clearly 
delineated forms of mountains, valleys, trees, 
and rivers, kill the fine color-sentiment of the 
picture. The great struggle of the modern 
landscapist is to get on with the least possible 
form and to suggest everything by tones of color, 
shades of light, drifts of air. Why ? Because 
these are the most sensuous qualities in nature 
and in art. The landscape that is the simplest 
in form and the finest in color is by all odds the 
most beautiful. It is owing to just these feat- 
ures that this Bowl of the desert is a thing of 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



57 



beauty instead of a dreary hollow in the hills. 
Only one other scene is comparable to it, and 
that the southern seas at sunset when the calm 
ocean reflects and melts into the color-glory of 
the sky. It is the same kind of beauty. Form 
is almost blurred out in favor of color and air v 

Yet here is more beauty destined to destruc- 
tion. It might be thought that this forsaken 
pot-hole in the ground would never come under 
the dominion of man, that its very worthlessness 
would be its safeguard against civilization, that 
none would want it, and everyone from necessity 
would let it alone. But not even the spot de- 
serted by reptiles shall escape the industry or the 
avarice (as you please) of man. A great company 
has been formed to turn the Colorado River 
into the sands, to reclaim this desert basin, and 
make it blossom as the rose. The water is to 
be brought down to the basin by the old channel 
of the New River. Once in reservoirs it is to be 
distributed over the tract by irrigating ditches, 
and it is said a million acres of desert will thus 
be made arable, fitted for homesteads, ready for 
the settler who never remains settled. 

A most laudable enterprise, people will say. 
Yes ; commercially no one can find fault with 
it. Money made from sand is likely to be clean 



Changing 
the desert. 



Irrigation 
in the basin. 



58 



THE DESERT 



Changing 
the climate. 



Dry air. 



money, at any rate. And economically these 
acres will produce large supplies of food. That 
is commendable, too, even if those for whom it 
is produced waste a good half of what they 
already possess. And yet the food that is pro- 
duced there may prove expensive to people 
other than the producers. This old sea-bed is, 
for its area, probably the greatest dry-heat 
generator in the world because of its depression 
and its barren, sandy surface. It is a furnace 
that whirls heat up and out of the Bowl, over 
the peaks of the Coast Kange into Southern 
California, and eastward across the plains to 
Arizona and Sonora. In what measure it is re- 
sponsible for the general climate of those States 
cannot be accurately summarized ; but it cer- 
tainly has a great influence, especially in the 
matter of producing dry air. To turn this 
desert into an agricultural tract would be to 
increase humidity, and that would be practi- 
cally to nullify the finest air on the continent. 

And why are not good air and climate as es- 
sential to human well-being as good beef and 
good bread ? Just now, when it is a world too 
late, our Government and the forestry societies 
of the country are awakening to the necessity 
of preserving the forests. National parks are 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



59 



being created wherever possible and the cutting 
of timber within them is prohibited. Why is 
this being done ? Ostensibly to preserve the 
trees, but in reality to preserve the water sup- 
ply, to keep the fountain-heads pure, to main- 
tain a uniform stage of water in the rivers. 
Very proper and right. The only pity is that 
it was not undertaken forty years ago. But 
how is the water supply, from an economic and 
hygienic stand-point, any more important than 
the air supply ? 

Grasses, trees, shrubs, growing grain, they, 
too, may need good air as well as human lungs. 
The deserts are not worthless wastes. You 
cannot crop all creation with wheat and alfal- 
fa. Some sections must lie fallow that other 
sections may produce. Who shall say that the 
preternatural productiveness of California is 
not due to the warm air of its surrounding des- 
erts ? Does anyone doubt that the healthful- 
ness of the countries lying west of the Mississ- 
ippi may be traced directly to the dry air and 
heat of the deserts. They furnish health to 
the human ; why not strength to the plant ? 
The deserts should never be reclaimed. They 
are the breathing-spaces of the west and should 
be preserved forever. 



Value of the 
air supply. 



Value of the 
deserts. 



60 



THE DESERT 



Destruction 
of natural 
beauty. 



Effects of 
mining, 
lumbering, 
agriculture. 



To speak about sparing anything because it 
is beautiful is to waste one's breath and incur 
ridicule in the bargain. The aesthetic sense — 
the power to enjoy through the eye, the ear, 
and the imagination — is just as important a 
factor in the scheme of human happiness as 
the corporeal sense of eating and drinking ; but 
there has never been a time when the world 
would admit it. The "practical men," who 
seem forever on the throne, know very well 
that beauty is only meant for lovers and young 
persons — stuff to suckle fools withal. The 
main affair of life is to get the dollar, and if 
there is any money in cutting the throat of 
Beauty, why, by all means, cut her throat. That 
is what the "practical men" have been doing 
ever since the world began. It is not necessary 
to dig up ancient history ; for have we not 
seen, here in California and Oregon, in our 
own time, the destruction of the fairest valleys 
the sun ever shone upon by placer and hy- 
draulic mining ? Have we not seen in Minne- 
sota and Wisconsin the mightiest forests that 
ever raised head to the sky slashed to pieces 
by the axe and turned into a waste of tree- 
stumps and fallen timber ? Have we not seen 
the Upper Mississippi, by the destruction of 



THE BOTTOM OF THE BOWL 



61 



the forests, changed from a broad, majestic 
river into a shallow, muddy stream ; and the 
beautiful prairies of Dakota turned under by 
the plough and then allowed to run to weeds ? 
Men must have coal though they ruin the val- 
leys and blacken the streams of Pennsylvania, 
they must have oil though they disfigure half 
of Ohio and Indiana, they must have copper 
if they wreck all the mountains of Montana 
and Arizona, and they must have gold though 
they blow Alaska into the Behring Sea. It is 
more than possible that the "practical men" 
have gained much practice and many dol- 
lars by flaying the fair face of these United 
States. They have stripped the land of its 
robes of beauty, and what have they given in 
its place ? Weeds, wire fences, oil-derricks, 
board shanties and board towns — things that 
not even a "practical man" can do less than 
curse at. 

And at last they have turned to the desert ! 
It remains to be seen what they will do with it. 
Eeclaiming a waste may not be so easy as break- 
ing a prairie or cutting down a forest. And 
Nature will not always be driven from her 
purpose. Wind, sand, and heat on Sahara 
have proven hard forces to fight against ; they 



Ploughing 
the prairies. 



" Practical 

men ' ' 



Fighting 
wind, sand, 
and heat. 



62 



THE DESERT 



Nature 
eternal. 



Return of 
desolation. 



may prove no less potent on the Colorado. 
And sooner or later Nature will surely come to 
her own again. Nothing human is of long du- 
ration. Men and their deeds are obliterated, 
the race itself fades ; but Nature goes calmly 
on with her projects. She works not for man's 
enjoyment, but for her own satisfaction and her 
own glory. She made the fat lands of the 
earth with all their fruits and flowers and fo- 
liage ; and with no less care she made the des- 
ert with its sands and cacti. She intended 
that each should remain as she made it. When 
the locust swarm has passed, the flowers and 
grasses will return to the valley; when man 
is gone, the sand and the heat will come back 
to the desert. The desolation of the kingdom 
will live again, and down in the Bottom of 
the Bowl the opalescent mirage will waver 
skyward on wings of light, serene in its sol- 
itude, though no human eye sees nor human 
tongue speaks its loveliness. 



CHAPTER IV 

THE SILENT RIVER 

The career of the Colorado, from its rise in 
the Wind River Mountains in Wyoming to its 
final disappearance in the G-ulf of California, 
seems almost tragic in its swift transitions. It 
starts out so cheerily upon its course ; it is so 
clear and pure, so sparkling with sunshine and 
spirit. It dashes down mountain valleys, gur- 
gles under bowlders, swirls over waterfalls, 
flashes through ravines and gorges. With its 
sweep and glide and its silvery laugh it seems to 
lead a merry life. But too soon it plunges into 
precipitous canyons and enters upon its fierce 
struggle with the encompassing rock. Now it 
boils and foams, leaps and strikes, thunders and 
shatters. For hundreds of miles it wears and 
worries and undermines the rock to its destruc- 
tion. During the long centuries it has cut 
down into the crust of the earth five thousand 
feet. But ever the stout walls keep casting it 
back, keep churning it into bubbles, beating it 
63 



Rise of the 
Colorado. 



In the 
canyon. 



64 



THE DESERT 



On the 
desert. 



The lower 
river. 



into froth. At last, its canyon course run, ex- 
hausted and helpless, it is pushed through the 
escarpments, thrust out upon the desert, to find 
its way to the sea as best it can. Its spirit is 
broken, its vivacity is extinguished, its color is 
deepened to a dark red — the trail of blood that 
leads up to the death. Wearily now it drifts 
across the desert without a ripple, without a 
moan. Like a wounded snake it drags its length 
far down the long wastes of sand to where the 
blue waves are flashing on the Calif ornian Gulf. 
And there it meets — obliteration. 

After the clash and roar of the conflict in the 
canyons how impressive seems the stillness of 
the desert, how appalling the unbroken silence 
of the lower river ! Day after day it moves sea- 
ward, but without a sound. You start at its 
banks to find no waves, no wash upon gravel 
beaches, no rush of water over shoals. Instead 
of the soothing murmur of breaking falls there 
is at times the boil of currents from below — 
waters flung up sullenly and soon flattened 
into drifting nothingness by their own weight. 

And how heavily the stream moves ! Its load 
of silt is gradually settling to the bottom, yet 
still the water seems to drag upon the shores. 
Every reef of sand, every island of mud, every 



THE SILENT RIVER 



65 



overhanging willow or cottonwood or handful 
of arrow-weed holds out a restraining hand. 
But slowly, patiently, winding about obstruc- 
tions, cutting out new channels, creeping where 
it may not run, the bubbleless water works its 
way to the sea. The night-winds steal along its 
shores and pass in and out among its sedges, 
but there are no whispering voices ; and the stars 
emerge and shine upon the flat floor of water, 
but there is no lustre. The drear desolation of 
it ! The blare of morning sunlight does not 
lift the pall, nor the waving illusions of the 
mirage break the stillness. The Silent River 
moves on carrying desolation with it ; and at 
every step the waters grow darker, darker with 
the stain of red — red the hue of decay. 

It was not through paucity of imagination 
that the old Spaniards gave the name — Col- 
orado.* During the first fifty years after its 
discovery the river was christened many times, 
but the name that finally clung to it was the 
one that gave accurate and truthful description. 

* Colorado is said to be the Spanish translation of the 
Piman name buqui aquimuti, according to the late Dr. 
Elliot Coues ; but the Spanish word was so obviously 
used to denote the red color of the stream, that any trans- 
lation from the Indian would seem superfluous. 



Sluggish 
movement. 



Stillness of 
river. 



The river's 
name. 



THE DESEKT 



Its red 
color. 



Compared 
with the 
Nile. 



You may see on the face of the globe numer- 
ous muddy Missouris, blue Khones, and yellow 
Tibers ; but there is only one red river and that 
the Colorado. It is not exactly an earthy red, 
not the color of shale and clay mixed ; but the 
red of peroxide of iron and copper, the sang-du- 
hceuf red of oriental ceramics, the deep insistent 
red of things time-worn beyond memory. And 
there is more than a veneer about the color. It 
has a depth that seems luminous and yet is sadly 
deceptive. You do not see below the surface 
no matter how long you gaze into it. As well 
try to see through a stratum of porphyry as 
through that water to the bottom of the river. 

To call it a river of blood would be exaggera- 
tion, and yet the truth lies in the exaggeration. 
As one walks along its crumbling banks there is 
the thought of that other river that changed its 
hue under the outstretched rod of the prophet. 
How weird indeed must have been the ensan- 
guined flow of the Nile, with its little waves 
breaking in crests of pink foam ! How strange 
the shores where the receding waters left upon 
sand and rock a bordering line of scarlet froth ! 
But the Colorado is not quite like that — not 
so ghastly, not so unearthly. It may suggest 
at times the heavy welling flow of thickening 



THE SILENT RIVER 



67 



blood which the sands at every step are trying 
to drink up ; but this is suggestion only, not 
realization. It seems to hint at blood, and 
under starlight to resemble it ; but the resem- 
blance is more apparent than real. The Colo- 
rado is a red river but not a scarlet one. 

It may be thought odd that the river should 
change so radically from the clear blue-green 
of its fountain-head to the opaque red of its 
desert stream, but rivers when they go wander- 
ing down to the sea usually leave their moun- 
tain purity behind them. The Colorado rush- 
ing through a thousand miles of canyons, cuts 
and carries seaward with it red sands of shale, 
granite, and porphyry, red rustings of iron, red 
grits of carnelian, agate and garnet. All the 
tributaries come bearing their tokens of red 
copper, and with the rains the whole red sur- 
face of the watershed apparently washes into 
the smaller creeks and thus into the valleys. 
When the river reaches the desert carrying its 
burden of silt, it no longer knows the bowlder- 
bed, the rocky shores, the breaking waterfalls 
that clarify a stream. And there are no large 
pools where the water can rest while the silt 
settles to the bottom. Besides, the desert 
itself at times pours into the river an even 



The blood 
hue. 



River 
changes. 



Bed sands 
and silt. 



68 



THE DESERT 



River- 
banks. 



"Bottom 
lands. 



deeper red than the canyons. And it does this 
not through arroyos alone, bnt also by a wide 
surface drainage. 

Often the slope of the desert to the river is 
gradual for many miles — sometimes like the 
top of a huge table slightly tilted from the 
horizontal. When the edge of the table is 
reached the mesa begins to break into terraces 
(often cut through by small gullies), and the 
final descent is not unlike the steps of a Roman 
circus leading down into the arena. During 
cloud-bursts the waters pour down these steps 
with great fury and the river simply acts as 
a catch-basin for all the running color of the 
desert. 

The " bottom " lands, forming the immediate 
banks of the river, are the silt deposits of 
former years. Often they are several miles in 
width and are usually covered with arrow-weed, 
willows, alders, and cottonwoods. The growth 
is dense if not tall and often forms an almost 
impenetrable jungle through which are scat- 
tered little openings where grass and flowers 
grow and Indians build reed wickiups and raise 
melons and corn in season. The desert terraces 
on either side (sometimes there is a row of sand- 
dunes) comedown to meet these "bottom" lands, 



THE SILENT RIVER 



and the line where the one leaves off and the 
other begins is drawn as with the sharp edge of 
a knife. Seen from the distant monntain tops 
the river moves between two long ribbons of 
green, and the borders are the gray and gold 
mesas of the desert. 

Afloat and drifting down between these lines 
of green your attention is perhaps not at first 
attracted by the water. Yon are interested in 
the thickets of alders and the occasional bursts 
of white and yellow flowers from among the 
bushes. They are very commonplace bushes, 
very ordinary flowers ; but how lovely they look 
as they seem to drift by the boat ! How silent 
again are these clumps of alder and willow ! 
There may be linnets and sparrows among them 
but they do not make their presence obtrusive 
in song. A hawk wheels along over the arrow- 
weed looking for quail, but his wings cut the 
air without noise. How deathly still everything 
seems ! The water wears into the soft banks, 
the banks keep sloughing into the stream, but 
again you hear no splashing fall. 

And the water itself is just as soundless. 
There is never a sunken rock to make a little 
gurgle, never a strip of gravel beach where a 
wave could charm you with its play. The beat 



The green 
bands. 



Bushes and 
flowers. 



Soundless 
water. 



70 



THE DESERT 



Wild fowl. 



Herons and 
bitterns. 



of oars breaks the air with a jar, but breaks no 
bubbles on the water. You look long at the 
stream and fall to wondering if there can be 
any life in it. What besides a polywog or a 
bullhead could live there ? Obviously, and in 
fact — nothing. Perhaps there are otter and 
beaver living along the pockets in the banks ? 
Yes ; there were otter and beaver here at one 
time, but they are very scarce to-day. But 
there are wild fowl ? Yes ; in the spring and 
fall the geese and ducks follow the river in 
their flights, but they do not like the red water. 
What proof ? Because they do not stop long in 
any one place. They swing into a bayou or 
slough late at night and go out at early dawn. 
They do not love the stream, but wild fowl on 
their migratory flights must have water, and 
this river is the only one between the Rockies 
and the Pacific that runs north and south. 

The blue herons and the bitterns do not mind 
the red mud or the red water, in fact they 
rather like it; but they were always solitary 
people of the sedge. They prowl about the 
marshes alone and the swish of oars drives them 
into the air with a guttural "Quowk." And 
there are snipe here, bands of them, flashing 
their wings in the sun as they wheel over the 



THE SILENT RIVER 



71 



Snipe. 



red waters or trip along the muddy banks 
singly or in pairs. They are quite at home on 
the bars and bayou flats, but it seems not a very 
happy home for them — that is judging by the 
absence of snipe talk. The little teeter flies 
ahead of you from point to point, but makes no 
twitter, the yellow-leg seldom sounds his mellow 
three-note call, and the kill-deer, even though 
you shoot at him, will not cry ' ' Kill-deer ! " 
"Kill-deer!" 

It may be the season when birds are mute, or 
it may merely happen so for to-day, or it may 
be that the silence of the river and the desert is 
an oppressive influence ; but certainly you have 
never seen bird-life so hopelessly sad. Even 
the kingfisher, swinging down in a blue line 
from a dead limb and skimming the water, 
makes none of that rattling clatter that you 
knew so well when you were a child by a New 
England mill-stream. And what does a king- 
fisher on such a river as this ? If it were filled 
with fish he could not see them through that 
thick water. 

The voiceless river ! From the canyon to the 
sea it flows through deserts, and ever the seal of 
silence is upon it. Even the scant life of its 
borders is dumb — birds with no note, animals 



Sad 
bird-life. 



72 



THE DESERT 



The 
forsaken. 



Solitude. 



Beauty of 
the river. 



with no cry, human beings with no voice. And 
so forsaken ! The largest river west of the 
monntains and yet the least known. There are 
miles upon miles of mesas stretching upward 
from the stream that no feet have ever trodden, 
and that possess not a vestige of life of any 
kind. And along its banks the same tale is 
told. You float for days and meet with no 
traces of humanity. When they do appear it is 
but to emphasize the solitude. An Indian 
wickiup on the bank, an Indian town ; yes, a 
white man's town, what impression do they 
make upon the desert and its river ? You drift 
by Yuma and wonder what it is doing there. 
Had it been built in the middle of the Pacific 
on a barren rock it could not be more isolated, 
more hopelessly " at sea." 

After the river crosses the border-line of 
Mexico it grows broader and flatter than ever. 
And still the color seems to deepen. For all its 
suggestion of blood it is not an unlovely color. 
On the contrary, that deep red contrasted with 
the green of the banks and the blue of the sky, 
makes a very beautiful color harmony. They 
are hues of depth and substance — hues that 
comport excellently well with the character of 
the river itself. And never a river had more 



THE SILENT RIVER 



73 



character than the Colorado. Yon may not 
fancy the solitude of the stream nor its sugges- 
tive coloring, but you cannot deny its majesty 
and its nobility. It has not now the babble of 
the brook nor the swift rush of the canyon 
water ; rather the quiet dignity that is above 
conflict, beyond gayety. It has grown old, it 
is nearing its end ; but nothing could be calmer, 
simpler, more sublime, than the drift of it down 
into the delta basin. 

The mountains are receding on every side, 
the desert is flattening to meet the sea, and the 
ocean tides are rising to meet the river. Half 
human in its dissolution, the river begins to 
break joint by joint. The change has been 
gradually taking place for miles and now mani- 
fests itself positively. The bottom lands widen, 
many channels or side-sloughs open upon the 
stream, and the water is distributed into the 
mouths of the delta. There is a break in the 
volume and mass — a disintegration of forces. 
And by divers ways, devious and slow, the 
crippled streams well out to the Gulf and never 
come together again. 

It is not so when the river is at its height with 
spring freshets. Then the stream is swollen 
beyond its banks. All the bottom lands for 



Its majesty. 



The delta. 

Disintegra- 
tion. 



74 



THE DESERT 



The river 

during 

floods. 



The "bore. 



Meeting of 
river and 



miles across, up to the very terraces of the 
mesas, are covered ; and the red flood moves 
like an ocean current, vast in width, ponderous 
in weight, irresistible in strength. All things 
that can be uprooted or wrenched away, move 
with it. Nothing can check or stop it now. 
It is the Grand Canyon river once more, free, 
mighty, dangerous even in its death-throes. 

And now at the full and the change of the 
moon, when the Gulf waters come in like a 
tidal wave, and the waters of the north meet 
the waters of the south, there is a mighty con- 
flict of opposing forces. The famous " bore " 
of the river-mouth is the result. "When the 
forces first meet there is a slow push-up of the 
water which rises in the shape of a ridge or 
wedge. The sea-water gradually proves itself 
the greater and the stronger body, and the ridge 
breaks into a crest and pitches forward with a 
roar. The undercut of the river sweeps away 
the footing of the tide, so to speak, and flings 
the top of the wave violently forward. The red 
river rushes under, the blue tide rushes over. 
There is the flash and dash of parti-colored 
foam on the crests, the flinging of jets of spray 
high in air, the long roll of waves breaking not 
upon a beach, but upon the back of the river, 



THE SILENT KIVER 



75 



and the shaking of the ground as though an 
earthquake were passing. After it is all done 
with and gone, with no trace of wave or foam 
remaining, miles away down the Gulf the red 
river slowly rises in little streams through the 
blue to the surface. There it spreads fan-like 
over the top of the sea, and finally mingles with 
and is lost in the greater body. 

The river is no more. It has gone down to 
its blue tomb in the Gulf — the fairest tomb that 
ever river knew. Something of serenity in the 
Gulf waters, something of the monumental in 
the bordering mountains, something of the un- 
known and the undiscovered over all, make it a 
fit resting-place for the majestic Colorado. The 
lonely stream that so shunned contact with 
man, that dug its bed thousands of feet in the 
depths of pathless canyons, and trailed its length 
across trackless deserts, sought out instinctively 
a point of disappearance far from the madding 
crowd. The blue waters of the Gulf, the 
beaches of shell, the red, red mountains standing 
with their feet in the sea, are still far removed 
from civilization's touch. There are no towns 
or roads or people by those shores, there are no 
ships upon those seas, there are no dust and 
smoke of factories in those skies. The Indians 



The blue 
tomb. 



Shores of 
the Qui/. 



76 



THE DESERT 



are there as undisturbed as in the days of 
Coronado, and the white man is coming but 
has not yet arrived. The sun still shines on 
unknown bays and unexplored peaks. There- 
fore is there silence — something of the hush of 
the deserts and the river that flows between. 



CHAPTER V 
LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR 

These deserts, cut through from north to 
south by a silent river and from east to west by 
two noisy railways, seem remarkable for only a 
few commonplace things, according to the con- 
sensus of public opinion. All that one hears 
or reads about them is that they are very hot, 
that the sunlight is very glaring, and that there 
is a sand-storm, a thirst, and death waiting 
for every traveller who ventures over the first 
divide. 

There is truth enough, to be sure, in the heat 
and glare part of it, and an exceptional truth in 
the other part of it. It is intensely hot on the 
desert at times, but the sun is not responsible 
for it precisely in the manner alleged. The 
heat that one feels is not direct sunlight so 
much as radiation from the receptive sands ; 
and the glare is due not to preternatural bright- 
ness in the sunbeam, but to there being no re- 
liefs for the eye in shadows, in dark colors, in 
77 



Popular 
ideas of ike 
desert. 



Sunlight on 
desert. 



78 



THE DESERT 



Glare 
and heat. 



Pure 
sunlight. 



heavy foliage. The vegetation of the desert is 
so slight that practically the whole surface of 
the sand acts as a reflector ; and it is this, rather 
than the sun's intensity, that causes the great 
body of light. The white roads in Southern 
France, for the surface they cover, are more 
glaring than any desert sands ; and the sunlight 
upon snow in Minnesota or New England is 
more dazzling. In certain spots where there 
are salt or soda beds the combination of heat 
and light is bewildering enough for anyone ; 
but such places are rare. White is something 
seldom seen on desert lands, and black is an 
unknown quantity in my observations. Even 
lava, which is popularly supposed to be as black 
as coal, has a reddish hue about it. Everything 
has some color— even the air. Indeed, we shall 
not comprehend the desert light without a mo- 
mentary study of this desert air. 

The circumambient medium which we call 
the atmosphere is to the earth only as so much 
ground-glass globe to a lamp — something that 
breaks, checks, and diffuses the light. We have 
never known, never shall know, direct sunlight 
— that is, sunlight in its purity undisturbed by 
atmospheric conditions. It is a blue shaft fall- 
ing perfectly straight, not a diffused white or 



LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR 



79 



yellow light ; and probably the life of the earth 
would not endure for an hour if submitted to 
its unchecked intensity. The white or yellow 
light, known to us as sunlight, is produced by 
the ground-glass globe of air, and it follows 
readily enough that its intensity is absolutely 
dependent upon the density of the atmosphere 
— the thickness of the globe. The cause for 
the thickening of the aerial envelope lies in the 
particles of dust, soot, smoke, salt, and vapor 
which are found floating in larger or smaller 
proportions in all atmospheres. 

In rainy countries like England and Holland 
the vapor particles alone are sufficiently numer- 
ous to cause at times great obscurity of light, 
as in the case of fog ; and the air is only com- 
paratively clear even when the skies are all blue. 
The light is almost always whitish, and the 
horizons often milky white. The air is thick, 
for you cannot see a mountain fifteen miles 
away in any sharpness of detail. There is a 
mistiness about the rock masses and a vague- 
ness about the outline. An opera-glass does 
not help your vision. The obscurity is not in 
the eyes but in the atmospheric veil through 
which you are striving to see. On the contrary, 
in the high plateau country of Wyoming, where 



Atmospher- 
ic envelope. 



Vapor 
particles. 



80 



THE DESERT 



Clear air. 



Dust 
particles. 



Hazes. 



the quantities of dust and vapor in the air are 
comparatively small, the distances that one can 
see are enormous. A mountain seventy miles 
away often appears sharp-cut against the sky, 
and at sunset the lights and shadows upon its 
sides look only ten miles distant. 

But desert air is not quite like the plateau 
air of Wyoming, though one can see through it 
for many leagues. It is not thickened by moist- 
ure particles, for its humidity is almost noth- 
ing ; but the dust particles, carried upward by 
radiation and the winds, answer a similar pur- 
pose. They parry the sunshaf t, break and color 
the light, increase the density of the envelope. 
Dust is always present in the desert air in some 
degree, and when it is at its maximum with the 
heat and winds of July, we see the air as a blue, 
yellow, or pink haze. This haze is not seen so 
well at noonday as at evening when the sun's 
rays are streaming through canyons, or at dawn 
when it lies in the mountain shadows and re- 
flects the blue sky. Nor does it muffle or ob- 
scure so much as the moisture-laden mists of 
Holland, but it thickens the air perceptibly and 
decreases in measure the intensity of the light. 

Yet despite the fact that desert air is dust- 
laden and must be thickened somewhat, there 



LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR 



81 



is something almost inexplicable about it. It 
seems so thin, so rarefied ; and it is so scent- 
less — I had almost said breathless — that it is 
like no air at all. You breathe it without feel- 
ing it, you look through it without being con- 
scious of its presence. Yet here comes in the 
contradiction. Desert air is very easily recog- 
nized by the eyes alone. The traveller in Cal- 
ifornia when he wakes in the morning and 
glances out of the car- window at the air in the 
mountain canyons, knows instantly on which 
side of the Tehachepi Kange the train is mov- 
ing. He knows he is crossing the Mojave. 
The lilac-blue veiling that hangs about those 
mountains is as recognizable as the sea air of 
the Massachusetts shore. And, strange enough, 
the sea breezes that blow across the deserts all 
down the Pacific coast have no appreciable ef- 
fect upon this air. The peninsula of Lower 
California is practically surrounded by water, 
but through its entire length and down the 
shores of Sonora to Mazatlan, there is nothing 
but that clear, dry air. 

I use the word " clear" because one can see 
so far through this atmosphere, and yet it is 
not clear or we should not see it so plainly. 
There is the contradiction again. Is it perhaps 



Seeing the 
desert air. 



Sea breezes 
on desert. 



82 



THE DESERT 



Colored air. 



Different 
hues. 



Producing 
color. 



the coloring of it that makes it so apparent ? 
Probably. Even the clearest atmosphere has 
some coloring about it. Usually it is an inde- 
finable blue. Air-blue means the most delicate 
of all colors — something not of surface depth 
but of transparency, builded up by superim- 
posed strata of air many miles perhaps in 
thickness. This air-blue is seen at its best in 
the gorges of the Alps, and in the mountain 
distances of Scotland ; but it is not so apparent 
on the desert. The coloring of the atmosphere 
on the Colorado and the Mojave is oftener 
pink, yellow, lilac, rose-color, sometimes fire- 
red. And to understand that we must take up 
the ground-glass globe again. 

It has been said that our atmosphere breaks, 
checks, and diffuses the falling sunlight like 
the globe of a lamp. It does something more. 
It acts as a prism and breaks the beam of sun- 
light into the colors of the spectrum. Some of 
these colors it deals with more harshly than 
others because of their shortness and their 
weakness. The blue rays, for instance, are the 
greatest in number ; but they are the shortest 
in length, the weakest in travelling power of 
any of them. Because of their weakness, and 
because of their affinity (as regards size) with 



83 



the small dust particles of the higher air re- 
gion, great quantities of these rays are caught, 
refracted, and practically held in check in the 
upper strata of the atmosphere. "We see them 
massed together overhead and call them the 
"blue sky." After many millions of these 
blue rays have been eliminated from the sun- 
light the remaining rays come down to earth 
as a white or yellow or at times reddish light, 
dependent upon the density of the lower atmos- 
phere. 

Now it seems that an atmosphere laden with 
moisture particles obstructs the passage earth- 
ward of the blue rays, less perhaps than an 
atmosphere laden with dust. In consequence, 
when they are thus allowed to come down into 
the lower atmosphere in company with the 
other rays, their vast number serves to dom- 
inate the others, and to produce a cool tone of 
color over all. So it is that in moist countries 
like Scotland you will find the sky cold-blue 
and the air tinged gray, pale-blue, or at twi- 
light in the mountain valleys, a chilly purple. 
A dust-laden atmosphere seems to act just the 
reverse of this. It obstructs all the rays in 
proportion to its density, but it stops the blue 
rays first, holds them in the upper air, while 



Refracted 
rays. 



Cold colors, 

how 

produced. 



84 



THE DESERT 



Warm 
colors. 



Sky colors. 



the stronger rays of red and yellow are only 
checked in the lower and thicker air-strata 
near the earth. The result of this is to pro- 
duce a warm tone of color over all. So it is 
that in dry countries like Spain and Morocco 
or on the deserts of Africa and America, you 
will find the sky rose-hued or yellow, and the 
air lilac, pink, red, or yellow. 

I mean now that the air itself is colored. Of 
course countless quantities of light-beams and 
dispersed rays break through the aerial envelope 
and reach the earth, else we should not see 
color in the trees or grasses or flowers about 
us ; but I am not now speaking of the color of 
objects on the earth, but of the color of the air. 
A thing too intangible for color you think ? 
But what of the sky overhead ? It is only tint- 
ed atmosphere. And what of the bright-hued 
horizon skies at sunrise and sunset, the rosy- 
yellow skies of Indian summer ! They are only 
tinted atmospheres again. Banked up in great 
masses, and seen at long distances, the air-color 
becomes palpably apparent. Why then should 
it not be present in shorter distances, in moun- 
tain canyons, across mesas and lomas, and over 
the stretches of the desert plains ? 

The truth is all air is colored, and that of 



85 



the desert is deeper dyed and warmer hued than 
any other for the reasons just given. It takes 
on many tints at different times, dependent 
upon the thickening of the envelope by heat 
and dnst-diffusing winds. I do not know if it 
is possible for fine dust to radiate with heat 
alone ; but certain it is that, without the aid of 
the wind, there is more dust in the air on hot 
days than at any other time. When the ther- 
mometer rises above 100° F., the atmosphere is 
heavy with it, and the lower strata are dancing 
and trembling with phantoms of the mirage at 
every point of the compass. It would seem as 
though the rising heat took up with it countless 
small dust-particles and that these were respon- 
sible for the rosy or golden quality of the air- 
coloring. 

There is a more positive tinting of the air 
produced sometimes by high winds. The lighter 
particles of sand are always being drifted here 
and there through the aerial regions, and even 
on still days the whirlwinds are eddying and 
circling, lifting long columns of dust skyward 
and then allowing the dust to settle back to 
earth through the atmosphere. The stronger 
the wind, and the more of dust and sand, the 
brighter the coloring. The climax is reached 



Color pro- 
duced by 
dust. 



Effect of 
heat. 



Effect of 
winds. 



86 



THE DESERT 



Sand- 
storms. 



Reflections 
upon sky. 



in the dramatic sand-storm — a veritable sand- 
fog which often turns half the heavens into a 
luminous red, and makes the sun look like a 
round ball of fire. 

The dust-particle in itself is sufficient to ac- 
count for the warmth of coloring in the desert 
air — sufficient in itself to produce the pink, yel- 
low, and lilac hazes. And yet I am tempted to 
suggest some other causes. It is not easy to 
prove that a reflection may be thrown upward 
upon the air by the yellow face of the desert 
beneath it — a reflection similar to that produced 
by a fire upon a night sky — yet I believe there 
is something of the desert's air-coloring derived 
from that source. Nor is it easy to prove that 
a reflection is cast by blue, pink, and yellow 
skies, upon the lower air-strata, yet certain 
effects shown in the mirage (the water illu- 
sion, for instance, which seems only the reflec- 
tion of the sky from heated air) seem to suggest 
it. And if we put together other casual obser- 
vations they will make argument toward the 
same goal. For instance, the common blue 
haze that we may see any day in the moun- 
tains, is always deepest in the early morning 
when the blue sky over it is deepest. At noon 
when the sky turns gray-blue the haze turns 



LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR 



87 



gray-blue also. The yellow haze of the desert 
is seen at its best when there is a yellow sunset, 
and the pink haze when there is a red sunset, 
indicating that at least the sky has some part 
in coloring by reflection the lower layers of 
desert air. 

Whatever the cause, there can be no doubt 
about the effect. The desert air is practically 
colored air. Several times from high mountains 
I have seen it lying below me like an enormous 
tinted cloud or veil. A similar veiling of pink, 
lilac, or pale yellow is to be seen in the gorges 
of the Grand Canyon ; it stretches across the 
Providence Mountains at noonday and is to be 
seen about the peaks and packed in the valleys 
at sunset; it is dense down in the Coahuila 
Basin ; it is denser from range to range across 
the hollow of Death Valley ; and it tinges the 
whole face of the Painted Desert in Arizona. 
In its milder manifestations it is always present, 
and during the summer months its appearance 
is often startling. By that I do not mean that 
one looks through it as through a highly colored 
glass. The impression should not be gained 
that this air is so rose-colored or saffron-hued 
that one has to rub his eyes and wonder if he is 
awake. The average unobservant traveller looks 



Blue, 

yellow, and 
pink hazes. 



The dust- 
veil. 



Summer 
coloring. 



88 



THE DESERT 



Local hues. 



Greens of 

desert 

plants. 



through it and thinks it not different from 
any other air. But it is different. In itself, 
and in its effect upon the landscape, it is per- 
haps responsible for the greater part of what 
everyone calls "the wonderful color" of the 
desert. 

And this not to the obliteration of local hue 
in sands, rocks, and plants. Quite independent 
of atmospheres, the porphyry mountains are 
dull red, the grease wood is dull green, the vast 
stretches of sand are dull yellow. And these 
large bodies of local color have their influence in 
the total sum-up. Slight as is the vegetation 
upon the desert, it is surprising how it seems 
to bunch together and count as a color-mass. 
Almost all the growths are " evergreen. " The 
shrubs and the trees shed their leaves, to be sure, 
but they do it so slowly that the new ones are 
on before the old ones are off. The general 
appearance is always green, but not a bright 
hue, except after prolonged rains. Usually it 
is an olive, bordering upon yellow. One can 
hardly estimate what a relieving note this thin 
thatch of color is, or how monotonous the 
desert might be without it. It is welcome, for 
it belongs to the scene, and fits in the color- 
scheme of the landscape as perfectly as the 



LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR 



89 



dark-green pines in the mountain scenery of 
Norway. 

The sands, again, form vast fields of local 
color, and, indeed, the beds of sand and gravel, 
the dunes, the ridges, and the mesas, make up 
the most widespread local hue on the desert. 
The sands are not "golden," except under 
peculiar circumstances, such as when they are 
whirled high in the air by the winds, and then 
struck broadside by the sunlight. Lying quietly 
upon the earth they are usually a dull yellow. 
In the morning light they are often gray, at 
noon frequently a bleached yellow, and at sun- 
set occasionally pink or saffron-hued. Wavering 
heat and mirage give them temporary coloring 
at times that is beautifully unreal. They then 
appear to undulate slightly like the smooth 
surface of a summer sea at sunset ; and the 
colors shift and travel with the undulations. 
The appearance is not common ; perfect calm, 
a flat plain, and intense heat being apparently 
the conditions necessary to its existence. 

The rocks of the upper peaks and those that 
make the upright walls of mountains, though 
small in body of color, are perhaps more varied 
in hue than either the sands or the vegetation, 
and that, too, without primary notes as in the 



Color of 
sands. 



Sands in 
mirage. 



90 



THE DESERT 



Color of 

mountain 

walls. 



Weather 
staining. 



Influence 
the air. 



Grand Canyon of the Yellowstone. The reds are 
always salmon-colored, terra-cotta, or Indian 
red ; the greens are olive-hued, plnm-colored, 
sage-green; the yellows are as pallid as the 
leaves of yellow roses. Fresh breaks in the 
wall of rock may show brighter colors that 
have not yet been weather-worn, or they may 
reveal the oxidation of various minerals. Often 
long strata and beds, and even whole mountain 
tops show blue and green with copper, or 
orange with iron, or purple with slates, or white 
with quartz. But the tones soon become sub- 
dued. A mountain wall may be dark red with- 
in, but it is weather-stained and lichen-covered 
without; long-reaching shafts of granite that 
loom upward from a peak may be yellow at 
heart but they are silver-gray on the surface. 
The colors have undergone years of " toning 
down " until they blend and run together like 
the faded tints of an Eastern rug. 

But granted the quantity and the quality of 
local colors in the desert, and the fact still re- 
mains that the air is the medium that influ- 
ences if it does not radically change them all. 
The local hue of a sierra may be gray, dark red, 
iron-hued, or lead-colored ; but at a distance, 
seen through dust-laden air, it may appear 



91 



topaz-yellow, sapphire-blue, bright lilac, rose- 
red — yes, fire-red. During the heated months of 
summer such colors are not exceptional. They 
appear almost every evening. I have seen at 
sunset, looking north from Sonora some twenty 
miles, the whole tower-like shaft of Baboqui- 
vari change from blue to topaz and from topaz 
to glowing red in the course of half an hour. I 
do not mean edgings or rims or spots of these 
colors upon the peak, but the whole upper half 
of the mountain completely changed by them. 
The red color gave the peak the appearance of 
hot iron, and when it finally died out the dark 
dull hue that came after was like that of a 
clouded garnet. 

The high ranges along the western side of 
Arizona, and the buttes and tall spires in the 
Upper Basin region, all show these warm fire- 
colors under heat and sunset light, and often in 
the full of noon. The colored air in conjunc- 
tion with light is always responsible for the 
hues. Even when you are close up to the moun- 
tains you can see the effect of the air in small 
ways. There are edgings of bright color to the 
hill-ridges and the peaks ; and in the canyons, 
where perhaps a sunshaft streams across the 
shadow, you can see the gold or fire-color of the 



Peak of 

Baboqui- 

vari. 



Buttes 
and spires. 



92 



THE DESEKT 



through 
canyons. 



Comple- 
mentary 
hues in 
shadow. 



Colored 
shadows, 



air most distinctly. Very beautiful are these 
golden sunshafts shot through the canyons. 
And the red shafts are often startling. It 
would seem as though the canyons were packed 
thick with yellow or red haze. And so in real- 
ity they are. 

There is one marked departure from the uni- 
form warm colors of the desert that should be 
mentioned just here. It is the clear blue seen 
in the shadows of western-lying mountains at 
sunset. This colored shadow shows only when 
there is a yellow or orange hued sunset, and it 
is produced by the yellow of the sky casting its 
complementary hue (blue) in the shadow. At sea 
a ship crossing a yellow sunset will show a mar- 
vellous blue in her sails just as she crosses the 
line of the sun, and the desert mountains re- 
peat the same complementary color with equal 
facility and greater variety. It is not of long 
duration. It changes as the sky changes, but 
maintains always the complementary hue. 

The presence of the complementary color in 
the shadow is exceptional, however. The shad- 
ows cast by such objects as the sahuaro and the 
palo verde are apparently quite colorless ; and 
so, too, are the shadows of passing clouds. The 
colored shadow is produced by reflection from 



LIGHT, AIR, AND COLOR 



93 



the sky, mixed with something of local color in 
the background, and also complementary color. 
It is usually blue or lilac-blue, on snow for ex- 
ample, when there is a blue sky overhead ; and 
lilac when shown upon sand or a blue stone 
road. Perhaps it does not appear often on the 
Mo jave- Colorado because the surfaces are too 
rough and broken with coarse gravel to make 
good reflectors of the sky. The fault is not in 
the light or in the sky, for upon the fine sands 
of the dunes, and upon beds of fine gypsum 
and salt, you can see your own shadow colored 
an absolute indigo ; and often upon bowlders of 
white quartz the shadows of cholla and grease 
wood are cast in almost cobalt hues. 

All color — local, reflected, translucent, com- 
plementary — is, of course, made possible by 
light and has no existence apart from it. 
Through the long desert day the sunbeams are 
weaving skeins of color across the sands, along 
the sides of the canyons, and about the tops of 
the mountains. They stain the ledges of cop- 
per with turquoise, they burn the buttes to a 
terra-cotta red, they paint the sands with rose 
and violet, and they key the air to the hue of 
the opal. The reek of color that splashes the 
western sky at sunset is but the climax of the 



Blue shad- 
ows upon 
salt-beds. 



Horv light 
makes color. 



94 



THE DESEKT 



Desert 
sunsets. 



sun's endeavor. If there are clouds stretched 
across the west the ending is usually one of ex- 
ceptional brilliancy. The reds are all scarlet, 
the yellows are like burnished brass, the oranges 
like shining gold. 

But the sky and clouds of the desert are of 
such unique splendor that they call for a 
chapter of their own. 



CHAPTEE VI 
DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS 

How silently, even swiftly, the days glide by 
out in the desert, in the waste, in the wilder- 
ness ! How " the morning and the evening 
make np the day " and the purple shadow slips 
in between with a midnight all stars ! And 
how day by day the interest grows in the long 
overlooked commonplace things of nature ! In 
a few weeks we are studying bushes, bowlders, 
stones, sand-drifts — things we never thought of 
looking at in any other country. And after a 
time we begin to make mental notes on the 
changes of light, air, clouds, and blue sky. At 
first we are perhaps bothered about the inten- 
sity of the sky, for we have always heard of the 
"deep blue " that overhangs the desert; and 
we expect to see it at any and all times. But 
we discover that it shows itself in its greatest 
depth only in the morning before sunrise. Then 
it is a dark blue, bordering upon purple ; and 
for some time after the sun comes up it holds a 
95 



Common- 
place things 
of nature. 



THE DESERT 



The blue sky. 



Changes in 
the blue. 



Dawns on 
the desert. 



deep blue tinge. At noon it has passed through 
a whole gamut of tones and is pale blue, yel- 
lowish, lilac-toned, or rosy ; in the late after- 
noon it has changed again to pink or gold or 
orange ; and after twilight and under the moon, 
warm purples stretch across the whole reach of 
the firmament from horizon to horizon. 

But the changes in the blue during the day 
have no constancy to a change. There is no 
fixed purpose about them. The caprices of 
light, heat, and dust control the appearances. 
Sometimes the sky at dawn is as pallid as a snow- 
drop with pearly grays just emerging from the 
blue ; and again it may be flushed with saffron, 
rose, and pink. When there are clouds and great 
heat the effect is often very brilliant. The 
colors are intense in chrome-yellows, golds, car- 
mines, magentas, malachite-greens — a body of 
gorgeous hues upheld by enormous side wings 
of paler tints that encircle the horizon to the 
north and south, and send waves of color far up 
the sky to the cool zenith. Such dawns are sel- 
dom seen in moist countries, nor are they usual 
on the desert, except during the hot summer 
months. 

The prevailing note of the sky, the one of- 
tenest seen, is, of course, blue — a color we may 



DESEKT SKY AND CLOUDS 



97 



not perhaps linger over because it is so com- 
mon. And yet how seldom it is appreciated ! 
Our attention is called to it in art — in a haw- 
thorn jar as large as a sugar-bowl, made in a 
certain period, in a certain Oriental school. 
The aesthetic world is perhaps set agog by 
this ceramic blue. But what are its depth and 
purity compared to the ethereal blue ! Yet the 
color is beautiful in the jar and infinitely more 
beautiful in the sky — that is beautiful in itself 
and merely as color. It is not necessary that 
it should mean anything. Line and tint do 
not always require significance to be beautiful. 
There is no tale or text or testimony to be tort- 
ured out of the blue sky. It is a splendid body 
of color ; no more. 

You cannot always see the wonderful quality 
of this sky-blue from the desert valley, because 
it is disturbed by reflections, by sand-storms, by 
lower air strata. The report it makes of itself 
when you begin to gain altitude on a mountain's 
side is quite different. At four thousand feet 
the blue is certainly more positive, more intense, 
than at sea-level ; at six thousand feet it begins 
to darken and deepen, and it seems to fit in the 
saddles and notches of the mountains like a 
block of lapis lazuli ; at eight thousand feet it 



Blue as a 
color. 



Sky from 
mountain 
heights. 



98 



THE DESEKT 



The night 
sky. 



Blackness 
of space- 



Bright sky- 
colors. 



has darkened still more and has a violet hne 
about it. The night sky at this altitude is al- 
most weird in its purples. A deep violet fits 
up close to the rim of the moon, and the orb 
itself looks like a silver wafer pasted upon the 
sky. 

The darkening of the sky continues as the 
height increases. If one could rise to, say, fifty 
thousand feet, he would probably see the sun 
only as a shining point of light, and the firma- 
ment merely as a blue-black background. The 
diffusion of light must decrease with the grow- 
ing thinness of the atmospheric envelope. At 
what point it would cease and the sky become 
perfectly black would be difficult to say, but 
certainly the limit would be reached when our 
atmosphere practically ceased to exist. Space 
from necessity must be black except where the 
straight beams of light stream from the sun and 
the stars. 

The bright sky-colors, the spectacular effects, 
are not to be found high up in the blue of the 
dome. The air in the zenith is too thin, too 
free from dust, to take deep colorings of red 
and orange. Those colors belong near the earth, 
along the horizons where the aerial envelope is 
dense. The lower strata of atmosphere are in 



DESEKT SKY AND CLOUDS 



99 



fact responsible for the gorgeous sunsets, the 
tinted hazes, the Indian-summer skies, the hot 
September glows. These all appear in their 
splendor when the sun is near the horizon-line 
and its beams are falling through the many 
miles of hot, dust-laden air that lie along the 
surface of the earth. The air at sunset after 
a day of intense heat-radiation is usually so 
thick that only the long and strong waves of 
color can pass through it. The blues are al- 
most lost, the neutral tints are missing, the 
greens are seen but faintly. The waves of red 
and yellow are the only ones that travel through 
the thick air with force. And these are the 
colors that tell us the story of the desert sunset. 
Ordinarily the sky at evening over the desert, 
when seen without clouds, shows the colors of 
the spectrum beginning with red at the bottom 
and running through the yellows, greens, and 
blues up to the purple of the zenith. In 
cool weather, however, this spectrum arrange- 
ment seems swept out of existence by a broad 
band of yellow-green that stretches half way 
around the circle. It is a pale yellow fading 
into a pale green, which in turn melts into a 
pale blue. In hot weather this pallor is changed 
to something much richer and deeper. A band 



Horizon 



Spectrum 
colors. 



Bands of 
yellow. 



LofC. 



100 



THE DESEKT 



The orange 



Desert 
clouds. 



of orange takes its place. It is a flame-colored or- 
ange, and its line is felt in reflection npon valley, 
plain, and mountain peak. This indeed is the 
orange light that converts the air in the moun- 
tain canyons into golden mist, and is measur- 
ably responsible for the yellow sunshafts that, 
streaming through the pinnacles of the western 
mountains, reach far across the upper sky in 
ever-widening bands. This great orange belt is 
lacking in that variety and vividness of coloring 
that comes with clouds, but it is not wanting 
in a splendor of its own. It is the broadest, the 
simplest, and in many respects the sublimest 
sunset imaginable — a golden dream with the 
sky enthroned in glory and the earth at its feet 
reflecting its lustre. 

But the more brilliant sunsets are only seen 
when there are broken translucent clouds in 
the west. There are cloudy days even on 
the desert. After many nights of heat, long 
skeins of white stratus will gather along the 
horizons, and out of them will slowly be woven 
forms of the cumulus and the nimbus. And it 
will rain in short squalls of great violence on 
the lomas, mesas, and bordering mountains. 
But usually the cloud that drenches a mountain 
I top eight thousand feet up will pass over an 



DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS 



101 



intervening valley, pouring down the same flood 
of rain, and yet not a drop of it reaching the 
ground. The air is always dry and the rain- 
drop that has to fall through eight thousand 
feet of it before reaching the earth, never gets 
there. It is evaporated and carried up to its 
parent cloud again. During the so-called " rainy 
season " you may frequently see clouds all about 
the horizon and overhead that are " raining " 
— letting down long tails and sheets of rain that 
are plainly visible; but they never touch the 
earth. The sheet lightens, breaks, and dissi- 
pates two thousand feet up. It rains, true 
enough, but there is no water, just as there are 
desert rivers, but they have no visible stream. 
That is the desert of it both above and below. 

With the rain come trooping almost all the 
cloud-forms known to the sky. And the thick 
ones like the nimbus carry with them a chilling, 
deadening eifect. The rolls and sheets of rain- 
clouds that cover the heavens at times rob the 
desert of light, air, and color at one fell swoop. 
Its beauty vanishes as by magic. Instead of 
colored haze there is gray gloom settling along 
the hills and about the mesas. The sands lose 
their lustre and become dull and formless, the 
vegetation darkens to a dead gray, and the 



Rain/all. 



Efect of the 
nimbus. 



102 



THE DESERT 



Cumuli. 



Heap clouds 
at sunset. 



Strati. 



mountains turn slate-colored, mouldy, unwhole- 
some looking. A mantle of drab envelops the 
scene, and the glory of the desert has departed. 

All the other cloud-forms, being more or less 
transparent, seem to aid rather than to obscure 
the splendor of the sky. The most common 
clouds of all are the cumuli. In hot summer 
afternoons they gather and heap up in huge 
masses with turrets and domes of light that reach 
at times forty thousand feet above the earth. 
At sunset they begin to show color before any 
of the other clouds. If seen against the sun 
their edges at first gleam silver- white and then 
change to gold; if along the horizon to the 
north or south, or lying back in the eastern sky, 
they show dazzling white like a snowy Alp. 
As the sun disappears below the line they begin 
to warm in color, turning yellow, pink, and rose. 
Finally they darken into lilac and purple, then 
sink and disappear entirely. The smaller forms 
of cumulus that appear in the west at evening 
are always splashes of sunset color, sometimes 
being shot through with yellow or scarlet. They 
ultimately appear floating against the night sky 
as spots of purple and gray. 

Above the cumuli and often flung across them 
like bands of gauze, are the strati — clouds of 



DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS 



103 



the middle air region. This veil or sheet-cloud 
might be called a twilight cloud, giving out as 
it does its greatest splendor after the sun has 
disappeared below the verge. It then takes all 
colors and with singular vividness. At times it 
will overspread the whole west as a sheet of 
brilliant magenta, but more frequently it blares 
with scarlet, carmine, crimson, flushing up and 
then fading out, shifting from one color to 
another ; and finally dying out in a beautiful 
ashes of roses. When these clouds and all their 
variations have faded into lilac and deep pur- 
ples, there are still bright spots of color in the 
upper sky where the cirri are receiving the last 
rays of the sun. 

The cirrus with its many feathery and fleecy 
forms is the thinnest, the highest, and the most 
brilliant in light of all the clouds. Perhaps its 
brilliancy is due to its being an ice-cloud. It 
seems odd that here in the desert with so much 
heat rising and tempering the upper air there 
should be clouds of ice but a few miles above it. 
The cirrus and also the higher forms of the 
cumulo-stratus are masses of hoar-frost, spicules 
of ice floating in the air, instead of tiny glob- 
ules of vapor. 

There is nothing remarkable about the desert 



Cirri. 



Ice-clouds. 



104 



THE DESERT 



Clouds 0} 
fire. 



The celestial 
tapestry. 



The desert 
moon. 



clouds — that is nothing very different from the 
clouds of other countries — except in light, color, 
and background. They appear incomparably 
more brilliant and fiery here than elsewhere on 
the globe. The colors, like everything else on 
the desert, are intense in their power, fierce in 
their glare. They vibrate, they scintillate, they 
penetrate and tinge everything with their hue. 
And then, as though heaping splendor upon 
splendor, what a wonderful background they 
are woven upon ! Great bands of orange, green, 
and blue that all the melted and fused gems 
in the world could not match for translucent 
beauty. Taken as a whole, as a celestial tapes- 
try, as a curtain of flame drawn between night 
and day, and what land or sky can rival it ! 

After the clouds have all shifted into purples 
and the western sky has sunk into night, then 
up from the east the moon — the misshapen 
orange-hued desert moon. How large it looks ! 
And how it warms the sky, and silvers the edges 
of the mountain peaks, and spreads its wide 
light across the sands ! Up, up it rises, losing 
something of its orange and gaining something 
in symmetry. In a few hours it is high in the 
heavens and has a great aureole of color about 
it. Look at the ring for a moment and you will 



DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS 



105 



see all the spectrum colors arranged in order. 
Pale hues they are but they are all there. Kain- 
bows by day and rainbows by night ! Kadiant 
circles of colored light — not one but many. 
Arches above arches — not two or three but five 
solar bows in the sky at one time ! What 
strange tales come out of the wilderness ! But 
how much stranger, how much more weird and 
extraordinary the things that actually happen 
in this desert land. 

High in the zenith rides the desert moon. 
What a flood of light comes from it ! What 
pale, phosphorescent light ! Under it miles and 
miles of cactus and grease wood are half re- 
vealed, half hidden ; and far away against the 
dark mountains the dunes of the desert shine 
white as snow-clad hills in December. The 
stars are forth, the constellations in their places, 
the planets large and luminous, yet none of 
them has much color or sparkle. The moon 
dims them somewhat, but even without the 
moon they have not the twinkle of the stars in 
higher, colder latitudes. The desert air seems 
to veil their lustre somewhat, and yet as points 
of light set in that purple dome of sky how 
beautiful they are ! 

Lying down there in the sands of the desert, 



Rings and 
rainbows. 



Moonlight. 



Stars. 



106 



THE DESERT 



The mid- 
night sky. 



Alone in the 
desert. 



The 
mysteries. 



alone and at night, with a saddle for your pil- 
low, and your eyes staring upward at the stars, 
how incomprehensible it all seems ! The im- 
mensity and the mystery are appalling; and 
yet how these very features attract the thought 
and draw the curiosity of man. In the pres- 
ence of the unattainable and the insurmount- 
able we keep sending a hope, a doubt, a query, 
up through the realms of air to Saturn's 
throne. What key have we wherewith to un- 
lock that door ? We cannot comprehend a tiny 
flame of our own invention called electricity, 
yet we grope at the meaning of the blazing 
splendor of Arcturus. Around us stretches 
the great sand-wrapped desert whose mystery 
no man knows, and not even the Sphinx could 
reveal ; yet beyond it, above it, upward still 
upward, we seek the mysteries of Orion and 
the Pleiades. 

What is it that draws us to the boundless and 
the fathomless ? Why should the lovely things 
of earth — the grasses, the trees, the lakes, the 
little hills — appear trivial and insignificant 
when we come face to face with the sea or the 
desert or the vastness of the midnight sky ? Is 
it that the one is the tale of things known and 
the other merely a hint, a suggestion of the un- 



DESERT SKY AND CLOUDS 



107 



known? Or have immensity, space, magnitude 
a peculiar beauty of their own ? Is it not true 
that bulk and breadth are primary and essen- 
tial qualities of the sublime in landscape ? And 
is it not the sublime that we feel in immensity 
and mystery ? If so, perhaps we have a partial 
explanation of our love for sky and sea and 
desert waste. They are the great elements. 
"We do not see, we hardly know if their boun- 
daries are limited ; we only feel their immen- 
sity, their mystery, and their beauty. 

And quite as impressive as the mysteries are 
the silences. "Was there ever such a stillness as 
that which rests upon the desert at night ! "Was 
there ever such a hush as that which steals 
from star to star across the firmament ! You 
perhaps think to break the spell by raising your 
voice in a cry ; but you will not do so again. 
The sound goes but a little way and then seems 
to come back to your ear with a suggestion of 
insanity about it. 

A cry in the night ! Overhead the planets 
in their courses make no sound, the earth is 
still, the very animals are mute. "Why then the 
cry of the human ? How it jars the harmo- 
nies ! How it breaks in discord upon the uni- 
ties of earth and air and sky ! Century after 



Space and 
immensity. 



The silences. 



The cry of 
the human. 



108 



THE DESERT 



century that cry has gone up, mobbing high 
heaven ; and always insanity in the cry, insan- 
ity in the crier. What folly to protest where 
none shall hear ! There is no appeal from the 
law of nature. It was made for beast and bird 
and creeping thing. Will the human never learn 
that in the eye of the law he is not different 
from the things that creep ? 



CHAPTER VII 
ILLUSIONS 

In our studies of landscape we are very fre- 
quently made the victims of either illusion or 
delusion. The eye or the mind deceives us, 
and sometimes the two may join forces to our 
complete confusion. We are not willing to 
admit different reports of an appearance. The 
Anglo - Saxon in us insists that there can be 
only one truth, and everything else must be 
error. It is known, for instance, that Castle 
Dome, which looks down on the Colorado River 
from Western Arizona, is a turret of granite — 
gray, red, brown, rock-colored, whatever color 
you please. With that antecedent knowledge 
in mind how difficult it is for us to believe the 
report of our eyes which says that at sunset the 
dome is amethystine, golden, crimson, or per- 
haps lively purple. The reality is one thing, 
the appearance quite another thing ; but why 
are not both of them truthful ? 

And how very shy people are about accepting 
109 



Reality and 



110 



THE DESEET 



Pre- 
conceived 
impressions. 



Deception 
by sunlight. 



Distorted 
forms and 
colors. 



a pink air, a bine shadow, or a field of yellow 
grass — snnlit lemon-yellow grass ! They have 
been bronght np from yonth to believe that air 
is colorless, that shadows are brown or gray or 
sooty black, and that grass is green — bottle- 
green. The preconceived impression of the 
mind refuses to make room for the actual im- 
pression of the eyes, and in consequence we are 
misled and deluded. 

But do the eyes themselves always report the 
truth ? Yes ; the truth of appearances, but as 
regards the reality they may deceive you quite 
as completely as the mind deceives you about 
the apparent. And for the deception of the 
eyes there is no wizard's cell or magician's cabi- 
net so admirably fitted for jugglery as this bare 
desert under sunlight. Its combination of 
light and air seem like reflecting mirrors that 
forever throw the misshapen image in unex- 
pected places, in unexpected lights and colors. 

What, for instance, could be more perplexing 
than the odd distortions in the forms and col- 
ors of the desert mountains ! A range of these 
mountains may often look abnormally grand, 
even majestic in the early morning as they 
stand against the eastern sky. The outlines of 
the ridges and peaks may be clear cut, the light 



ILLUSIONS 



111 



and shade of the canyons and barrancas well 
marked, the cool morning colors of the face- 
walls and foot-hills distinctly placed and hold- 
ing their proper value in the scene. But by 
noon the whole range has apparently lost its 
lines and shrunken in size. Under the beating 
rays of the sun and surrounded by wavering 
heated atmosphere its shadow masses have been 
grayed down, neutralized, perhaps totally oblit- 
erated ; and the long mountain surface appears 
as flat as a garden wall, as smooth as a row of 
sand-dunes. There is no indication of bar- 
ranca or canyon. The air has a blue-steel glow 
that muffles light and completely wrecks color. 
Seen through it the escarpments show only 
dull blue and gray. All the reds, yellows, and 
pinks of the rocks are gone ; the surfaces wear 
a burnt-out aspect as though fire had eaten into 
them and left behind only a comb of volcanic 
ash. 

At evening, however, the range seems to re- 
turn to its majesty and magnitude. The peaks 
reach up, the bases broaden, the walls break 
into gashes, the ridges harden into profiles. 
The sun is westering, and the light falling 
more obliquely seems to bring out the shadows 
in the canyons and barrancas. Last of all the 



Changed 
appearance 
of moun- 
tains. 



Changes in 
line, light, 
and color. 



112 



THE DESERT 



colors come slowly back to their normal con- 
dition, as the flush of life to one recovering 
from a trance. One by one they begin to glow 
on chasm, wall, and needled summit. The air, 
too, changes from steel-blue to yellow, from yel- 
low to pink, from pink to lilac, until at last 
with the sun on the rim of the earth, the moun- 
tains, the air, the clouds, and the sky are all 
glowing with the tints of ruby, topaz, rose-dia- 
mond — hues of splendor, of grandeur, of glory. 
Suppose, if you please, a similar range of 
mountains thirty miles away on the desert. 
Even at long distance it shows an imposing 
bulk against the sky, and you think if you were 
close to it, wall and peak would loom colossal. 
How surprised you are then as you ride toward 
it, hour after hour, to find that it does not seem 
to grow in size. When you reach the foot-hills 
the high mountains seem little larger than when 
seen at a distance. You are further surprised 
that what appeared like a flat-faced range with 
its bases touching an imaginary curb-stone for 
miles, is in reality a group -range with retiring 
mountains on either side that lead off on acute 
angles. The group is round, and has as much 
breadth as length. And still greater is your 
surprise when you discover that the green top 



ILLUSIONS 



113 



of the gray-based mountain, which has been 
puzzling you for so many hours, does not be- 
long to the gray base at all. It is a pine-clad 
top resting upon another and more massive base 
far back in the group. It is the highest and 
most central peak of the range. 

Such illusions are common, easily explained ; 
and yet, after all, not so easily understood. They 
are caused by false perspective, which in turn 
is caused by light and air. On the desert, per- 
spective is always erratic. Bodies fail to detach 
themselves one from another, foreshortening is 
abnormal, the planes of landscape are flattened 
out of shape or telescoped, objects are huddled 
together or superimposed one upon another. 
The disturbance in aerial perspective is just 
as bad. Colors, lights, and shadows fall into 
contradictions and denials, they shirk and bear 
false witness, and confuse the judgment of the 
most experienced. 

No wonder amid this distortion of the natural, 
this wreck of perspective, that distance is such 
a proverbially unknown quantity. It is the one 
thing the desert dweller speaks about with cau- 
tion. It may be thirty or fifty miles to that 
picacho — he is afraid to hazard a guess. If you 
should go up to the top of your mountain range 



False per- 
spective. 



Abnormal 
foreshort- 
ening. 



Contradic- 
tions and 
denials. 



Deceptive 
distances. 



114 



THE DESERT 



Bangers of 
the desert. 



Immensity 
of valley- 
plains. 



and look at the valley beyond it, the distance 
across might seem very slight. Yon can easily 
see to where another mountain range begins 
and trails away into the distance. Perhaps yon 
fancy a few hours' ride will take you over that 
valley-plain to where the distant foot-hills are 
lying soft and warm at the bases of the moun- 
tains. You may be right and then again you 
may be wrong. You may spend two days get- 
ting to those foot-hills. 

This deception of distance is not infrequently 
accompanied by fatal consequences. The inex- 
perienced traveller thinks the distance short, he 
can easily get over the ground in a few hours. 
But how the long leagues drag out, spin out, 
reach out ! The day is gone and he is not 
there, the slight supply of water is gone and 
he is not there, his horse is gone and he himself 
is going, but he is not there. The story and its 
ending are familiar to those who live near the 
desert, for every year some mining or explor- 
ing party is lost. If there are any survivors 
they usually make the one report : ' ' The dis- 
tance seemed so short." But there are no short 
distances on the desert. Every valley-plain is 
an immense wilderness of space. 

There is another illusion — a harmless one — 



ILLUSIONS 



115 



that has not to do with perspective but with 
shadow and local color. The appearance is that 
of shadows cast down along the mountain's side 
by the ridges or hogbacks. Any little patch of 
shadow is welcome on the desert, particularly 
upon the mountains which are always so strongly 
flooded with light. But this is only a counter- 
feit presentment. The ridges have no vegetation 
upon them to hold in place the soil and rocks 
and these are continually breaking away into 
land-slips. The slips or slides expose to view 
streaks of local color such as may be seen in 
veins of iron and copper, in beds of lignite or 
layers of slate. It is these streaks and patches 
of dark color that have broken away and slipped 
down the mountain side under the ridges that 
give the appearance of shadows. They have 
the true value in light, and are fair to look upon 
even though they are deception. The weather- 
beaten rocks of a talus under a peak may create 
a similar illusion, but the shadow effect loses a 
velvety quality which it has when seen under 
the ridges. 

The illusion of a cloud-shadow resting upon 
the foot-hills or in the valley, is frequently pro- 
duced by the local color of lava-beds. Lava 
may be of almost any color, but when seen close 



Shadow 
illusions. 



Color- 
patches on 
mountains. 



116 



THE DESERT 



Illusion of 
lava-beds. 



Appearance 
of cloud- 
shadows. 



V 



Mirage. 



Definition. 



to view it is usually a reddish-black. At a dis- 
tance, however, and as a mass, its beds have the 
exact value of a cloud-shadow. Any eye would 
be deceived by it. The great inundations of 
lava that have overrun the plains and oozed 
down the foot-hills and around the lomas (par- 
ticularly on the Mojave) look the shadow to the 
very life. The beds are usually hedged about 
on all sides by banks of fine sand that seem to 
stand for sunlight surrounding the shadow, and 
thus the deception is materially augmented. 
Many times I have looked up at the sky to be 
sure there was no cloud there, so palpable is this 
Java shadow-illusion. 

But perhaps the most beautiful deception 
known to the desert is the one oftenest seen 
— mirage. Everyone is more or less familiar 
with it, for it appears in some form wherever 
the air is heated, thickened, or has strata of 
different densities. It shows on the water, on 
the grass plains, over ploughed fields or gravel 
roads, on roadbeds of railways ; but the bare 
desert with its strong heat-radiation is pri- 
marily its home. The cause of its appearance 
— or at least one of its appearances — is familiar 
knowledge, but it may be well to state it in 
dictionary terms : " An optical illusion due to 



ILLUSIONS 



117 



excessive bending of light-rays in traversing 
adjacent layers of air of widely different densi- 
ties, whereby distorted, displaced, or inverted 
images are produced." * 

This is no doubt the true explanation of that 
form of mirage in which people on Sahara see 
caravans in the sky trailing along, upside down, 
like flies upon the ceiling ; or on the ocean see 
ships hanging in the air, masts and sails down- 
ward. But the explanation is very general and 
is itself in some need of explanation. Perhaps 
then I may be pardoned for trying to illustrate 
the theory of mirage in my own way. 

The rays of light that come from the sun to 
the earth appear to travel in a straight line, 
but they never do. As soon as they meet with 
and pass into the atmospheric envelope they are 
bent or deflected from their original direction 
and reach the earth by obtuse angles or in long 
descending curves like a spent rifle ball. This 
bending of the rays is called refraction, which 
must not be confounded with reflection — a some- 
thing quite different. Now refraction is, of 
course, the greatest where the atmosphere is the 
densest. The thicker the air the more acute the 
bending of the light-ray. Hence the thick lay- 
* Century Dictionary. 



Need of ex- 
planation. 



Refraction 
of light- 
rays. 



118 



THE DESERT 



Dense air- 
strata. 



Illustration 
of camera 
lens. 



ers of air lying along or a few feet above the 
surface of the earth on a hot day are peculiarly 
well-fitted to distort the light-ray, and conse- 
quently well-fitted to produce the effect of mir- 
age. These layers of air are of varying densi- 
ties. Some are thicker than others ; and in 
this respect the atmosphere bears a resemblance 
to an ordinary photographic or telescopic lens. 
Let us use the lens illustration for a moment 
and perhaps it will aid comprehension of the 
subject. 

You know that the lens, like the air, is of 
varying thicknesses or densities, and you know 
that in the ordinary camera the rays of light, 
passing through the upper part of the lens, 
are refracted or bent toward the perpendicular 
so that they reach the ground-glass "finder" 
at the bottom ; and that the rays passing 
through the lower part of the lens go to the top 
of the "finder." The result is that you have 
on the " finder" or the negative something re- 
versed — things upside down. That, so far as 
the reversed image goes, is precisely the case in 
mirage. The air-layers act as a lens and bend 
the light-rays so that when seen in our " finder " 
— the eye — the bottom of a tree, for example, 
goes to the top and the top goes to the bottom. 



ILLUSIONS 



119 



But there is something more to mirage than 
this reversed image. The eyes do not see things 
" in their place," but see them hanging in the 
air as in the case of ships and caravans. To 
explain this, in the absence of a diagram, we 
shall have to take up another illustration. Sup- 
pose a light-ray so violently bent by the heat 
lying above a sidewalk that it should come to 
us around a street corner, and thereby we should 
see a man coming up a side street that lies at 
right angles to us. He would appear to our 
eyes to be coming up, not the side street, but 
the street we are standing in. The man, to all 
appearances, would not be "in his place." We 
should see him where he is not. 

Now suppose again instead of the light-rays 
bending to right or left (as in the street-corner 
illustration), we consider them as bending sky- 
ward or earthward. Suppose yourself at sea 
and that you are looking up into the sky above 
the horizon. You see there a ship " out of its 
place," hanging in the air in an impossible 
manner — something which is equivalent, or at 
least analogous, to looking down the street and 
seeing the image of the man around the corner. 
You are looking straight into the sky, yet see- 
ing a ship below the verge. The light-rays 



The bent 
light-ray. 



Ships at 



120 



THE DESEKT 



Ships up- 
side down. 



Wherein the 
illusion. 



coming from the ship on the water describe an 
obtuse angle or curve in reaching the eye. The 
rays from the bottom of the ship, lying in a 
dense part of the air-lens, are more acutely 
bent than those from the masts, and hence they 
go to the top of the photographic plate or your 
field of vision, whereas the rays from the ship's 
masts, being in a thinner atmosphere, are less 
violently bent, and thus go to the bottom of your 
field of vision. The result is the ship high in 
air above the horizon-line and upside down. 

The illusion or deception consists in this : 
We usually see things in flat trajectory, so to 
speak. Light comes to us in comparatively 
straight rays. The mind, therefore, has formu- 
lated a law that we see only by straight rays. 
In the case of mirage the light comes to us on 
curved, bent, or angular rays. The eyes recog- 
nize this, but the mind refuses to believe it and 
hence is deceived. We think we see the ship 
in the air by the straight ray, but in reality we 
see the ship on the water by the bent ray. It 
is thus that ships are often seen when far below 
the horizon-line, and that islands in the sea be- 
low the ocean's rim, and so far away as a hun- 
dred miles, are seen looming in the air. " Loom- 
ing " is the word that describes the excessive 



ILLUSIONS 



121 



apparent elevation of the object in the sky and 
is more striking on sea than land. Captains of 
vessels often tell strange tales of how high in 
the air, ships and towns and coasts are seen. 
The report has even come back from Alaska of 
a city seen in the sky that is supposed to be the 
city of Bristol. In tropical countries and over 
warm ocean-currents there are often very acute 
bendings of the light-rays. Why may it not be 
so in colder lands with colder currents ? 

The form of mirage that gives us the reversed 
image is seen on the desert as well as on the 
sea ; but not frequently — at least not in my ex- 
perience. There is an illusion of mountains 
hanging peak downward from the sky, but one 
may wander on the deserts for months and 
never see it. The reality and the phantom 
both appear in the view — the phantom seeming 
to draw up and out of the original in a dis- 
torted, cloud-like shape. It is almost always 
misshapen, and as it rises high in air it seems 
to be detached from the original by currents of 
air drifted in between. More familiar sights 
are the appearances of trees, animals, houses, 
wagons, all hanging in the air in enlarged and 
elongated shapes and, of course, reversed. I 
have seen horses hitched to a wagon hanging 



" Looming ' 
of vessels, 
islands, 
and cities. 



Reversed 
image of 
mountains. 



122 



THE DESERT 



Horses and 
cattle in 
mirage. 



Illusion of 

rising 

buttes. 



high up in the air with the legs of the horses 
twenty feet long and the wagon as large as a 
cabin. The stilted antelope " forty feet high 
and upside down" is as seldom seen in the 
sky as upon the earth ; but desert cattle in 
bunches of half a dozen will sometimes walk 
about on the aerial ceiling in a very astonishing 
way. 

Yet these, too, are infrequent appearances. 
Nor is the illusion of buttes rising from the 
plain in front of you often seen. It happens 
only when there are buttes at one side or the 
other, and, I presume, this mirage is caused by 
the bending of the light-rays to the right or left. 
It presents certainly a very beautiful effect. 
The buttes rise up from the ground, first one 
and then another, until there is a range of them 
that holds the appearance of reality perhaps for 
hours, and then gradually fades out like a stere- 
opticon picture — the bases going first and the 
tops gradually melting into the sky. "When 
seen at sunset against a yellow sky the effect is 
magnificent. The buttes, even in illusion, take 
on a wonderful blue hue (the complementary 
color of yellow), and they seem to drift upon the 
sky as upon an open sea. 

The bending of the light-rays to either side 



ILLUSIONS 



123 



instead of up or down, as following the perpen- 
dicular, may or may not be of frequent occur- 
rence. I do not even know if the butte appear- 
ance is to be attributed to that. The opportunity 
to see it came to me but once, and I had not 
then the time to observe whether the buttes in 
the mirage had sides the reverse of the originals. 
Besides, it is certain that mirage is caused in 
other ways than by the bending of light-rays. 
The most common illusion of the desert is the 
water-mirage and that is caused by reflection, 
not refraction. Its usual appearance is that of 
a lake or sea of water with what looks at a dis- 
tance to be small islands in it. There are those 
with somewhat more lively imagination than 
their fellows who can see cows drinking in the 
water, trees along the margin of the shore 
(palms usually), and occasionally a farm-house, 
a ship, or a whale. I have never seen any of 
these wonderful things, but the water and 
island part of the illusion is to be seen almost 
anywhere in the desert basins during hot weath- 
er. In the lower portions of the Colorado it 
sometimes spreads over thousands of acres, and 
appears not to move for hours at a stretch. At 
other times the wavering of the heat or the 
swaying of the air strata, or a change in the 



Other 
causes for 
mirage. 



Water- 
mirage. 



The lake 
appearance. 



124 



THE DESERT 



How pro~ 
duced. 



Objects in 
the water. 



Confused 
mirage. 



density of the air will give the appearance of 
waves or slight undulations on the water. In 
either case the illusion is quite perfect. Water 
lying in such a bed would reflect the exact color 
of the sky over it ; and what the eyes really 
see in this desert picture is the reflection of the 
sky not from water but from strata of thick air. 

This illusion of water is probably seen more 
perfectly in the great dry lake-beds of the des- 
ert where the ground is very flat and there is 
no vegetation, than elsewhere. In the old Coa- 
huila Valley region of the Colorado the water 
comes up very close to you and the more you 
flatten the angle of reflection by flattening your- 
self upon the ground, the closer the water ap- 
proaches. The objects in it which people im- 
agine look like familiar things are certainly very 
near. And these objects — wild-fowl, bushes, 
tufts of swamp grass, islands, buttes — are fre- 
quently bewildering because some of them are 
right side up and some of them are not. Some 
are reversed in the air and some are quietly 
resting upon the ground. 

It happens at times that the whole picture is 
confused by the light-rays being both reflected 
and refracted, and in addition that the rays 
from certain objects come to us in a direct line. 



ILLUSIONS 



125 



The ducks, reeds, and tufts of grass, for instance, 
are only clods of dirt or sand-banked bushes 
which are detached at the bottom by heavy drifts 
of air. We see their tops right side up by look- 
ing through the air-layer or some broken por- 
tion of it. But in the same scene there may be 
trees upside down, and mountains seen in re- 
flection, drawn out to stupendous proportions. 
In the Salton Basin one hot day in September a 
startled coyote very obligingly ran through a 
most brilliant water-mirage lying directly be- 
fore me. I could only see his head and part of 
his shoulders, for the rest of him was cut off 
by the air-layer ; but the appearance was that of 
a wolf swimming rapidly across a lake of water. 
The illusion of the water was exact enough be- 
cause it was produced by reflection, but there 
was no illusion about the upper part of the 
coyote. The rays of light from his head and 
shoulders came to me unrefracted and unre- 
flected — came as light usually travels from ob- 
ject to eye. 

But refracted or reflected, every feature of the 
water-mirage is attractive. And sometimes its 
kaleidoscopic changes keep the fancy moving at 
a pretty pace. The appearance and disappear- 
ance of the objects and colors in the mirage 



The swim- 
ming wolf. 



126 



THE DESERT 



Colors and 
shadoivs in 
mirage. 



Trembling 
air. 



are often quite wonderful. The reversed moun- 
tain peaks, with light and shade and color upon 
them, wave in and out of the imaginary lake, 
and are perhaps succeeded by undulations of 
horizon colors in grays and pinks, by sunset 
skies and scarlet clouds, or possibly by the 
white cap of a distant sierra that has been 
caught in the angle of reflection. 

But with all its natural look one is at loss to 
understand how it could ever be seriously ac- 
cepted as a fact, save at the first blush. People 
dying for water and in delirium run toward it 
— at least the more than twice-told tales of trav- 
ellers so report — but I never knew any healthy 
eye that did not grow suspicious of it after the 
first glance. It trembles and glows too much 
and soon reveals itself as something intangible, 
hardly of earth, little more than a shifting fan- 
tasy. You cannot see it clear-cut and well-de- 
fined, and the snap-shot of your camera does 
not catch it at all. 

Yet its illusiveness adds to, rather than de- 
tracts from, its beauty. Eose-colored dreams are 
always delightful ; and the mirage is only a 
dream. It has no more substantial fabric than 
the golden haze that lies in the canyons at sun- 
set. It is only one of nature's veilings which 



ILLUSIONS 



127 



she puts on or off capriciously. But again its 
loveliness is not the less when its uncertain, 
fleeting character is revealed. It is one of the 
desert's most charming features because of its 
strange light and its softly glowing opaline color. 
And there we have come back again to that 
beauty in landscape which lies not in the lines 
of mountain valley and plain, but in the almost 
formless masses of color and light. 



Beauty of 
mirage. 



Views of 
Nature. 



CHAPTEE VIII 
CACTUS AND GREASE WOOD 

Nature seems a benevolent or a malevolent 
goddess just as our own inadequate vision 
happens to see her. If we have eyes only for 
her creative beauties we think her all goodness ; 
if we see only her power of destruction we 
incline to think she is all evil. With what 
infinite care and patience, worthy only of a 
good goddess, does she build up the child, the 
animal, the bird, the tree, the flower ! How 
wonderfully she fits each for its purpose, round- 
ing it with strength, energy, and grace ; and 
beautifying it with a prodigality of colors. For 
twenty years she works night and day to bring 
the child to perfection, for twenty days she toils 
upon the burnished wings of some insect buz- 
zing in the sunlight, for twenty hours she paints 
the gold upon the petals of the dandelion. And 
then what ? What of the next twenty ? Does 
she leave her handiwork to take care of itself 
until an unseen dragon called Decay comes 
128 



CACTUS AND GEEASE WOOD 



129 



along to destroy it ? Not at all. The good 
goddess has a hand that builds np. Yes ; and 
she has another hand that takes down. The 
marvellous skill of the one has its complement, 
its counterpart, in the other. Block by block 
she takes apart the mosaic with just as much 
deftness as she put it together. 

Those first twenty years of our life we were 
allowed to sap blood and strength from our sur- 
roundings ; the last twenty years of our life our 
surroundings are allowed to sap blood and 
strength from us. It is Nature's plan and it is 
carried out without any feeling. "With the same 
indifferent spirit that she planted in us an eye 
to see or an ear to hear, she afterward plants a 
microbe to breed and a cancer to eat. She in 
herself is both growth and decay. The virile 
and healthy things of the earth are hers ; and 
so, too, are disease, dissolution, and death. The 
flower and the grass spring up, they fade, they 
wither ; and Nature neither rejoices in the life 
nor sorrows in the death. She is neither good 
nor evil ; she is only a great law of change that 
passeth understanding. The gorgeous pagean- 
try of the earth with all its beauty, the life 
thereon with its hopes and fears and struggles, 
and we a part of the universal whole, are brought 



Growth and 
decay. 



Nature's 
plan. 



130 



THE DESERT 



The law of 
change. 



Nature foil- 
ing her own 
plans. 



Attack and 
defence. 



up from the dust to dance on the green in the 
sunlight for an hour ; and then the procession 
that comes after us turns the sod and we creep 
back to Mother Earth. All, all to dust again ; 
and no man to this day knoweth the why thereof. 
One is continually assailed with queries of 
this sort whenever and wherever he begins to 
study Nature. He never ceases to wonder why 
she should take such pains to foil her own plans 
and bring to naught her own creations. Why 
did she give the flying fish such a willowy tail 
and such long fins, why did she labor so in- 
dustriously to give him power of flight, when at 
the same time she was giving another fish in the 
sea greater strength, and a bird in the air great- 
er swiftness wherewith to destroy him ? Why 
should she make the tarantula such a powerful 
engine of destruction when she was in the same 
hour making his destroyer, the tarantula-wasp ? 
And always here in the desert the question 
comes up : Why should Nature give these 
shrubs and plants such powers of endurance 
and resistance, and then surround them by heat, 
drouth, and the attacks of desert animals ? It 
is existence for a day, but sooner or later the 
I growth goes down and is beaten into dust. 



The individual dies. Yes ; but not the species. 



CACTUS AND GEEASE WOOD 



131 



Perhaps now we are coming closer to an under- 
standing of Nature's method. It is the species 
that she designs to last, for a period at least ; 
and the individual is of no great importance, 
merely a sustaining factor, one among millions 
requiring continual renewal. It is a small mat- 
ter whether there are a thousand acres of grease 
wood more or less, hut it is important that the 
family be not extinguished. It grows readily 
in the most barren spots, is very abundant and 
very hardy, and hence is protected only by an 
odor and a varnish. On the contrary take the 
bisnaga — a rather rare cactus. It has only a 
thin, short tap-root, therefore it has an enor- 
mous upper reservoir in which to store water, 
and a most formidable armor of fish-hook 
shaped spines that no beast or bird can pene- 
trate. Eemove the danger which threatens the 
extinction of the family and immediately Nat- 
ure removes the defensive armor. On the 
desert, for instance, the yucca has a thorn like 
a point of steel. Follow it from the desert in- 
to the high tropical table-lands of Mexico where 
there is plenty of soil and moisture, plenty of 
chance for yuccas to thrive, and you will find 
it turned into a tree, and the thorn merely a 
dull blade-ending. Follow the sahuaro and the 



Preserva- 
tion of the 



Means of 
preserva- 
tion. 



132 



THE DESERT 



Maintain- 
ing the 
status quo. 



The plant- 
struggle for 
life. 



pitahaya into the tropics again, and with their 
cousin, the organ cactus, yon find them growing 
a soft thorn that would hardly penetrate cloth- 
ing. Abundance of soil and rain, abundance 
of other vegetation for browsing animals, and 
there is no longer need of protection. With 
it the family would increase too rapidly. 

So it seems that Nature desires neither in- 
crease nor decrease in the species. She wishes 
to maintain the status quo. And for the sake 
of keeping up the general healthfulness and 
virility of her species she requires that there 
shall be change in the component parts. Each 
must suffer not a " sea change," but a chemical 
change ; and passing into liquids, gases, or dusts, 
still from the grave help on the universal plan. 
So it is that though Nature dips each one of her 
desert growths into the Styx to make them in- 
vulnerable, yet ever she holds them by the heel 
and leaves one point open to the destroying 
arrow. 

Yet it is remarkable how Nature designs and 
prepares the contest — the struggle for life — 
that is continually going on in her world. How 
wonderfully she arms both offence and defence ! 
What grounds she chooses for the conflict ! 
What stern conditions she lays down ! Given a 



CACTUS AND GREASE WOOD 



133 



waste of sand and rock, given a heat so intense 
that nnder a summer sun the stones will blister 
a bare foot like hot iron, given perhaps two or 
three inches of rain in a twelvemonth ; and 
what vegetation could one expect to find grow- 
ing there ? Obviously, none at all. But 
no ; Nature insists that something shall fight 
heat and drouth even here, and so she designs 
strange growths that live a starved life, and 
bring forth after their kind with much labor. 
Hardiest of the hardy are these plants and just 
as fierce in their way as the wild-cat. You can- 
not touch them for the claw. They have no 
idea of dying without a struggle. You will 
find every one of them admirably fitted to en- 
dure. They are marvellous engines of resist- 
ance. 

The first thing that all these plants have to 
fight against is heat, drouth, and the evaporation 
of what little moisture they may have. And 
here Nature has equipped them with ingenuity 
and cunning. Not all are designed alike, to be 
sure, but each after its kind is good. There 
are the cacti, for example, that will grow where 
everything else perishes. Why ? For one rea- 
son because they have geometrical forms that 
prevent loss from evaporation by contracting a 



Fighting 
heat and 
drouth. 



Prevention 
of evapora- 
tion. 



134 



THE DESERT 



Absence of 
large leaves. 



Exhaust of 
moisture. 



minimum surface for a given bulk of tissue.* 
There is no waste, no unnecessary exposure of 
surface. Then there are some members of the 
family like the " old man " cactus, that have 
thick coatings of spines and long hairy growths 
that prevent the evaporation of moisture by 
keeping off the wind. Then again the cacti 
have no leaves to tempt the sun. Many of the 
desert growths are so constructed. Even such 
a tree as the lluvia d'oro has needles rather than 
leaves, though it does put forth a row of tiny 
leaves near the end of the needle ; and when we 
come to examine the ordinary trees such as the 
mesquite, the depua, the palo breya, the palo 
verde, and all the acacia family, we find they 
have very narrow leaves that have a fashion of 
hanging diagonally to the sun and thus avoid- 
ing the direct rays. Nature is determined that 
there shall be no unnecessary exhaust of moist- 
ure through foliage. The large-leafed bush or 
tree does not exist. The best shade to be found 
on the desert is under the mesquite, and unless 
it is very large, the sun falls through it easily 
enough. 

* I am indebted to Professor Forbes of the University 
of Arizona for this and several other statements in con- 
nection with desert vegetation. 



CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD 



135 



As an extra precaution some shrabs are given 
a shellac-like sap or gum with which they var- 
nish their leaves and make evaporation almost 
impossible. The ordinary grease wood is an ex- 
ample of this ; and perhaps because of its var- 
nish, it is, with the cacti, the hardiest of all the 
desert growths. It is found wherever anything 
living is found, and nourishes under the fiercest 
heat. Its leaves always look bright and have a 
sticky feeling about them as though recently 
shellacked. 

There are other growths that seem to have a 
fine sense of discretion in the matter of danger, 
for they let fall all their leaves at the first ap- 
proach of drouth. The ocatilla, or "candle 
wood n as it is sometimes called, puts out a long 
row of bright leaves along its stems after a rain, 
but as soon as drouth comes it sheds them has- 
tily and then stands for months in the sunlight 
— a bundle of bare sticks soaked with a resin 
that will burn with fire, but will not evaporate 
with heat. The sangre de dragon (sometimes 
called sangre en grado) does the same thing. 

But Nature's most common device for the 
protection and preservation of her desert brood 
is to supply them with wonderful facilities for 
finding and sapping what moisture there is, and 



Gums and 
varnishes 
of bushes. 



The ocatilla. 



136 



THE DESERT 



Tap roots. 



Under- 
ground 
structure. 



Feeding the 
top growth. 



conserving it in tanks and reservoirs. The 
roots of the greasewood and the mesquite are 
almost as powerful as the arms of an octopus, 
and they are frequently three times the length 
of the bush or tree they support. They will 
bore their way through rotten granite to find a 
damp ledge almost as easily as a diamond drill ; 
and they will pry rocks from their foundations 
as readily as the wistaria wrenches the ornamen- 
tal wood-work from the roof of a porch. They 
are always thirsty and they are always running 
here and there in the search for moisture. A 
vertical section of their underground structure 
revealed by the cutting away of a river bank or 
wash is usually a great surprise. One marvels 
at the great network of roots required to sup- 
port such a very little growth above ground. 

Yet this network serves a double purpose. 
It not only finds and gathers what moisture 
there is but stores it in its roots, feeding the 
top growth with it economically, not wastefully. 
It has no notion of sending too much moisture 
up to the sunlight and the air. Cut a twig and 
it will often appear very dry ; cut a root and 
you will find it moist. 

The storage reservoir below ground is not an 
unusual method of supplying water to the plant. 



CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD 



137 



Many of the desert growths have it. Perhaps 
the most notable example of it is the wild gourd. 
This is little more than an enormous tap root 
that spreads out turnip-shaped and is in size 
often as large around as a man's body. It holds 
water in its pulpy tissue for months at a time, and 
while almost everything above ground is parched 
and dying the vines and leaves of the gourd, 
fed from the reservoir below, will go on grow- 
ing and the flowers continue blooming with the 
most unruffled serenity. In the Sonora deserts 
there is a cactus or a bush (its name I have never 
heard) growing from a root that looks almost like 
a hornet's nest. This root is half-wood, half- 
vegetable, and is again a water reservoir like the 
root of the gourd. 

But there are reservoirs above ground quite 
as interesting as those below. The tall fluted 
column of the sahuaro, sometimes fifty feet 
high, is little more than an upright cistern for 
holding moisture. Its support within is a se- 
ries of sticks arranged in cylindrical form and 
held together by some fibre, some tissue, and a 
great deal of saturated pulp. Drive a stick 
into it after a rain and it will run sap almost 
like the maguey from which the Indians distill 
mescal. All the cacti conserve water in their 



Storage 
reservoirs 
below 
ground. 



Reservoirs 

above 

ground. 



138 



THE DESERT 



TJdckened 
barks. 



Gathering 
moisture. 



Attacks 
upon desert 
plants. 



lobes or columns or at the base near the ground. 
So too the Spanish bayonets, the yuccas, the 
prickly pears and the chollas. 

Many of the shrubs and trees like the sangre 
de dragon and the torote have enlarged or 
thickened barks to hold and supply water. If 
you cut them the sap runs readily. When it 
congeals it forms a gum which heals over the 
wound and once more prevents evaporation. 
Existence for the plants would be impossible 
without such inventions. Plant life of every 
kind requires some moisture all the time. It 
is an error to suppose because they grow in the 
so-called " rainless desert " that therefore they 
exist without water. They gather and hus- 
band it during wet periods for use during dry 
periods, and in doing so they seem to display 
almost as much intelligence as a squirrel or an ant 
does in storing food for winter consumption. 

Is Nature's task completed then when she 
has provided the plants with reservoirs of water 
and tap roots to pump for them ? By no means. 
How long would a tank of moisture exist in the 
desert if unprotected from the desert animals ? 
The mule-deer lives here, and he can go for 
weeks without water, but he will take it every 
day if he can get it. And the coyote can run 



CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD 



139 



the hills indefinitely with little or no moisture ; 
but he will eat a water melon, rind and all, and 
with great relish, when the opportunity offers. 
The sahuaro, the bisnaga, the cholla, and the 
pan-cake lobed prickly pear would have a short 
life and not a merry one if they were left to the 
mercy of the desert prowler. As it is they are 
sometimes sadly worried about their roots by 
rabbits and in their lobes by the deer. It 
seems almost incredible but is not the less a 
fact, that deer and desert cattle will eat the 
cholla — fruit, stem, and trunk — though it 
bristles with spines that will draw blood from 
the human hand at the slightest touch. 

Nature knows very well that the attack will 
come and so she provides her plants with various 
different defenses. The most common weapon 
which she gives them is the spine or thorn. 
Almost everything that grows has it and its 
different forms are many. They are all of them 
sharp as a needle and some of them have saw- 
edges that rip anything with which they come 
in contact. The grasses, and those plants akin 
to them like the yucca and the maguey, are 
often both saw-edged and spine-pointed. All 
the cacti have thorns, some straight, some 
barbed like a harpoon, some curved like a hook. 



Browsing 
animals. 



Weapons of 
defense. 



140 



THE DESERT 



The spine 
and thorn. 



The cruci- 
fixion thorn. 



There are chollas that have a sheath covering 
the thorn — a scabbard to the sword — and when 
anything pnshes against it the sheath is left 
sticking in the wound. The different forms of 
the bisnaga are little more than vegetable por- 
cupines. They bristle with quills or have hook- 
shaped thorns that catch and hold the intruder. 
The sahuaro has not so many spines, but they 
are so arranged that you can hardly strike the 
cylinder without striking the thorns. 

The cacti are defended better than the other 
growths because they have more to lose, and are 
consequently more subject to attack. And yet 
there is one notable exception. The crucifix- 
ion thorn is a bush or tree somewhat like the 
palo verde, except that it has no leaf. It is a 
thorn and little else. Each small twig runs 
out and ends in a sharp spike of which the 
branch is but the supporting shaft. It bears 
in August a small yellow flower but this grows 
out of the side of the spike. In fact the whole 
shrub seems created for no other purpose than 
the glorification of the thorn as a thorn.* 

* It is said to be very scarce but I have found it grow- 
ing along the Castle Creek region of Arizona, also at 
Kingman, Peach Springs, and further north. A stunted 
variety grows on the Mojave but it is not frequently seen 
on the Colorado. 



CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD 



141 



Tree, bush, plant and grass — great and small 
alike — each has its sting for the intruder. You 
can hardly stoop to pick a desert flower or pull a 
bunch of small grass without being aware of a 
prickle on your hand. Nature seems to have 
provided a whole arsenal of defensive weapons 
for these poor starved plants of the desert. 
Not any of the lovely growths of the earth, 
like the lilies and the daffodils, are so well de- 
fended. And she has given them not only 
armor but a spirit of tenacity and stubbornness 
wherewith to carry on the struggle. Cut out 
the purslain and the iron weed from the garden 
walk, and it springs up again and again, con- 
tending for life. Put heat, drouth, and ani- 
mal attack against the desert shrubs and they 
fight back like the higher forms of organic life. 
How typical they are of everything in and about 
the desert. There is but one word to describe 
it and that word — fierce — I shall have worn 
threadbare before I have finished these chapters. 

We have not yet done with enumerating the 
defenses of these plants. The bushes like the 
greasewood and the sage have not the bulk of 
body to grow the thorn. They are too slight, 
too rambling in make-up. Besides their reser- 
voirs are protected by being in their roots under 



The sting qf 
flowers. 



Fierceness 
of the plant. 



142 



THE DESERT 



Odors and 

juices. 



Saps astrin- 
gent and 
cathartic. 



the ground. But Nature has not left their 
tops wholly at the mercy of the deer. Take 
the leaf of the sage and crush it in your hand. 
The odor is anything but pleasant. No animal 
except the jack-rabbit, no bird except the sage 
hen will eat it ; and no human being will eat 
either the rabbit or the hen, if he can get any- 
thing else, because of the rank sage flavor. 
Rub the greasewood in your hand and it feels 
harsh and brittle. The resinous varnish of the 
leaves gives it a sticky feeling and a disagreeable 
odor again. Nothing on the desert will touch 
it. Cut or break a twig of the sangre de dragon 
and a red sap like blood runs out. Touch it to 
the tongue and it proves the most powerful of 
astringents. The Indians use it to cauterize 
bullet wounds. Again no animal will touch it. 
Half the plants on the desert put forth their 
leaves with impunity. They are not disturbed 
by either browsers or grazers. Some of them 
are poisonous, many of them are cathartic or 
emetic, nearly all of them are disagreeable to 
the taste. 

So it seems with spines, thorns, barbs, resins, 
varnishes and odorous smells Nature has armed 
her desert own very effectually. And her ex- 
penditure of energy may seem singularly dis- 



CACTUS AND GKEASEWOOD 



143 



proportionate to the result attained. The little 
vegetation that grows in the waste may not 
seem worth while, may seem insignificant 
compared with the great care bestowed upon it. 
But Nature does not think so. To her the cac- 
tus of the desert is just as important in its 
place as the arrowy pine on the mountain. 
She means that something shall grow and bear 
fruit after its kind even on the gravel beds of 
the Colorado ; she means that the desert shall 
have its covering, scanty though it be, just the 
same as the well-watered lands of the tropics. 

But are they useful, these desert growths ? 
Certainly they are ; just as useful as the pine 
tree or the potato plant. To be sure, man 
cannot saw them into boards or cook them in a 
pot ; but then Nature has other animals be- 
side man to look after, other uses for her pro- 
ducts than supporting human life. She toils 
and spins for all alike and man is not her spe- 
cial care. The desert vegetation answers her 
purposes and who shall say her purposes have 
ever been other than wise ? 

Are they beautiful these plants and shrubs 
of the desert ? Now just what do you mean 
by that word " beautiful " ? Do you mean 
something of regular form, something smooth 



The expend- 
iture of 
energy. 



The desert 
covering. 



Use of 
desert 
plants. 



144 



THE DESEET 



Their 
beauty. 



Beauty in 
character. 



Forms of 
the yucca 
and 



and pretty ? Are yon dragging into natnre 
some remembrances of classic art ; and are 
you looking for the Dionysins face, the 
Doryphorns form, among these trees and 
bushes ? If so the desert will not furnish you 
too much of beauty. But if you mean some- 
thing that has a distinct character, something 
appropriate to its setting, something admirably 
fitted to a designed end (as in art the peasants 
of Millet or the burghers of Kembrandt and 
Eodin), then the desert will show fopth much 
that people nowadays are beginning to think 
beautiful. Mind you, perfect form and perfect 
color are not to be despised ; neither shall you 
despise perfect fitness and perfect character. 
The desert plants, every one of them, have very 
positive characters ; and I am not certain but 
that many of them are interesting and beauti- 
ful even in form and color. 

No doubt it is an acquired taste that leads 
one to admire greasewood and cactus ; but can 
anyone be blind to the graceful form of the 
maguey, or better still, the yucca with its tall 
stalk rising like a shaft from a bowl and capped 
at the top by nodding creamy flowers ? On the 
mountains and the mesas the sahuaro is so com- 
mon that perhaps we overlook its beauty of 



CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD 



145 



form ; yet its lines are as sinuous as those of a 
Moslem minaret, its flutings as perfect as those 
of a Doric column. Often and often you see it 
standing on a ledge of some rocky peak, like 
the lone shaft of a ruined temple on a Greek 
headland. And by way of contrast what could 
be more lovely than the waving lightness, the 
drooping gracefulness of the lluvia d'oro. The 
swaying tossing lluvia d'oro, well called the 
" shower of gold " I It is one of the most beau- 
tiful of the desert trees with its white skin like 
the northern birch, its long needles like the 
pine, and the downward sweep of its branches 
like the willow. A strange wild tree that seems 
to shun all society, preferring to dwell like a 
hermit among the rocks. It roots itself in the 
fissures of broken granite and it seems at its 
happiest when it can let down its shower of gold 
over some precipice. 

There are other tree forms, like the palo verde 
and the mesquite, that are not wanting in a 
native grace ; and yet it may as well be admitted 
that most of the trees and bushes are lacking 
in height, mass, and majesty. It is no place 
for large growths that reach up to the sun. The 
heat and drouth are too great and tend to make 
form angular and grotesque. But these very 



The lluvia 
d'oro. 



Grotesque 
forms. 



146 



THE DESERT 



Abnormal 
colors. 



Blossoms 
and flowers. 



conditions that dwarf form perhaps enhance 
color by distorting it in an analogous manner. 
When plants are starved for water and grow in 
thin poor soil they often put on colors that are 
abnormal, even unhealthy. Because of starva- 
tion perhaps the little green of the desert is a 
sallow green ; and for the same reason the lobes 
of the prickly pear are pale-green, dull yellow, 
sad pink or livid mauve. The prickly pear 
seems to take all colors dependent upon the 
poverty, or the mineral character, of the ground 
where it grows. In that respect perhaps it is 
influenced in the same way as the parti-colored 
hydrangea of the eastern dooryard. 

All the cacti are brilliant in the flowers they 
bear. The top of the bisnaga in summer is at 
first a mass of yellow, then bright orange, finally 
dark red. The sahuaro bears a purple flower, 
and the cholla, the ocatilla, the pitahaya come 
along with pink or gold or red or blue flowers. 
And again all the bushes and trees in summer 
put forth showers of color — graceful masses of 
petaled cups that look more like flowers grown 
in a meadow than blossoms grown on a tree. 
In June the palo verde is a great ball of yellow- 
gold, but there is a variety of it with a blue- 
I green bark that grows a blossom almost like an 



CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD 



147 



eastern violet. And down in Sonora one is daz- 
zled by the splendor of the guyacan (or gual- 
lacan) which throws out blossoms half -blue and 
half -red. All the commoner growths like the 
sage, the mesquite, the palo fierro, and the palo 
bianco, are blossom bearers. In fact everything 
that grows at all in the desert puts forth in sea- 
son some bright little flag of color. In the 
mass they make little show, but examined in 
the part they are interesting because of their 
nurture, their isolation, and their peculiarity 
of form and color. The conditions of life have 
perhaps contorted them, have paled or grayed 
or flushed or made morbid their coloring ; but 
they are all of them beautiful. Beautiful color 
is usually unhealthy color as we have already 



Aside from the blossoms upon bush and tree 
there are few bright petals shining in the des- 
ert. It is no place for flowers. They are too 
delicate and are usually wanting in tap root 
and armor. If they spring up they are soon 
cut down by drouth or destroyed by animals. 
Many tales are told of the flowers that grow on 
the waste after the rains, but I have not seen 
them though I have seen the rains. There are 
no lupins, phacelias, pentstemons, poppies, or 



Many 
varieties. 



Wild 
flowers, 



148 



THE DESEET 



Salt-bush. 



The grasses. 



The lichens. 



yellow violets. Occasionally one sees the wild 
verbena or patches of the evening primrose, or 
up in the swales the little baby blue-eye grow- 
ing all alone, or perhaps the yellow mimnlns ; 
but all told they do not make np a very strong 
contingent. The salt bush that looks the color 
of Scotch heather, out-bulks them all ; and yet 
is not conspicuously apparent. Higher up in the 
hills and along the mesas one often meets with 
many strange flowers, some fiery red and some 
with spines like the Canadian thistle ; but not 
down in the hot valleys of the desert. 

Nor are there many grasses of consequence 
aside from a small curled grass and the heavy 
sacaton that grow in bunches upon isolated 
portions of the desert. By " isolated " I mean 
that for some unknown reason there are tracts 
on the desert seemingly sacred to certain plants, 
some to cholla, some to yuccas, some to grease 
wood, some to sahuaros, some to sacaton grass. 
It seems to be a desert oddity that the vegeta- 
tion does not mix or mingle to any great ex- 
tent. There are seldom more than four or five 
kinds of growth to be found in one tract. It 
is even noticeable in the lichens. One moun- 
tain range will have all gray lichens on its 
northern walls, another range will have all 



CACTUS AND GREASEWOOD 



149 



orange lichens, and still another will be mottled 
by patches of coal-black lichens. 

Strange growths of a strange land ! Heat, 
drouth, and starvation gnawing at their vitals 
month in and month out ; and yet how deter- 
mined to live, how determined to fulfill their 
destiny ! They keep fighting off the elements, 
the animals, the birds. Never by day or by 
night do they loose the armor or drop the spear 
point. And yet with all the struggle they se- 
renely blossom in season, perpetuate their kinds, 
and hand down the struggle to the newer gen- 
eration with no jot of vigor abated, no tittle 
of hope dissipated. Strange growths indeed ! 
And yet strange, perhaps, only to us who have 
never known their untrumpeted history. 



The 

continuous 

struggle. 



Meeting 
desert re- 
quirements. 



The 

peculiar 
desert 
character. 



CHAPTEE IX 

DESERT ANIMALS 

The life of the desert lives only by virtue of 
adapting itself to the conditions of the desert. 
Nature does not bend the elements to favor the 
plants and the animals ; she makes the plants 
and the animals do the bending. The torote 
and the evening primrose must get used to heat, 
drouth, and a rocky bed ; the coyote must learn 
to go without food and water for long periods. 
Even man, whose magnificent complacency leads 
him to think himself one of Nature's favorites, 
fares no better than a wild cat or an angle of 
cholla. He must endure the same heat, thirst, 
and hunger or perish. There is no other alter- 
native. 

And so it happens that those things that can 
live in the desert become stamped after a time 
with a peculiar desert character. The struggle 
seems to develop in them special characteristics 
and make them, not different from their kind ; 
but more positive, more insistent The yucca 
150 



DESERT ANIMALS 



151 



of the Mojave is the yucca of New Mexico and 
Old Mexico but hardier ; the wild cat of the 
Colorado is the wild cat of Virginia but swifter, 
more ferocious ; the Yuma Indian is like the 
Zuni or the Navajo but lanker, more sinewy, 
more enduring. Father Garces, who passed 
through here one hundred and twenty-five years 
ago, records in his Memoirs more than once the 
wonderful endurance of the desert Indians. 
"The Jamajabs (a branch of the Yumas) en- 
dure hunger and thirst for four days," he writes 
in one place. The tale is told that the Indians 
in the Coahuila Valley at the present day can 
do substantially the same thing. And, too, it 
is said that the Yumas have traveled from the 
Colorado to the Pacific, across the desert on 
foot, without any sustenance whatever. No 
one, not to the desert born, could do such a 
thing. Years of training in starvation, thirst 
and exposure have produced a man almost as 
hardy as the cactus, and just as distinctly a 
type of the desert as the coyote. 

But the Indian and the plant must have some 
water. They cannot go without it indefinitely. 
And just there the desert animals seem to fit 
their environment a little snugger than either 
plant or human. For, strange as it may ap- 



Desert 
Indians. 



The 

animals. 



152 



THE DESERT 



Life 

without 

water. 



Endurance 
of the 
jack-rabbit. 



pear, many of them get no water at all. There 
are sections of the desert, fifty or more miles 
square, where there is not a trace of water in 
river, creek, arroyo or pocket, where there is 
never a drop of dew falling ; and where the two 
or three showers of rain each year sink into the 
sand and are lost in half an hour after they 
have fallen. Yet that fifty-mile tract of sand 
and rock supports its animal, reptile and insect 
life just the same as a similar tract in Illinois 
or Florida. How the animals endure, how — 
even on the theory of getting used to it — the 
jack-rabbit, the ground squirrel, the rat, and 
the gopher can live for months without even 
the moisture from green vegetation, is one of 
the mysteries. A mirror held to the nose of 
a desert rabbit will show a moist breath-mark 
on the glass. The moisture came out of the 
rabbit, is coming out of him every few sec- 
onds of the day ; and there is not a drop of 
moisture going into him. Evidently the an- 
cient axiom : "Out of nothing, nothing comes" 
is all wrong. 

It is said in answer that the jack-rabbit gets 
moisture from roots, cactus-lobes and the like. 
And the reply is that you find him where there 
are no roots but greasewood and no cactus at 



DESERT ANIMALS 



153 



Rock 
squirrels. 



all. Besides there is no evidence from an ex- 
amination of his stomach that he ever eats any- 
thing but dried grass, bark, and sage leaves. 
But if the matter is a trifle doubtful about the 
rabbit on account of his traveling capacities, 
there is no doubt whatever about the ground 
squirrels, the rock squirrels, and the prairie 
dogs. None of them ever gets more than a hun- 
dred yards from his hole in his life, except pos- 
sibly when migrating. And the circuit about 
each hole is usually bare of everything except 
dried grass. There in no moisture to be had. 
The prairie dog is not found on the desert, but 
in Wyoming and Montana there are villages of 
them on the grass prairies, with no water, root, 
lobe, or leaf within miles of them. The old 
theory of the prairie dog digging his hole down 
to water has no basis in fact. Patience, a strong 
arm and a spade will get to the bottom of his 
burrow in half an hour. 

All the desert animals know the meaning of 
a water famine, and even those that are pro- 
nounced water drinkers know how to get on 
with the minimum supply. The mule-deer 
whose cousin in the Adirondacks goes down to 
water every night, lives in the desert mountains, 
month in and month out with nothing more 



Prairie 
dogs and 
water. 



Water 
famine. 



154 



THE DESEKT 



Mule-deer 
browsing. 



Coyotes and 
wild-cats 
living with- 
out water. 



watery to quench, thirst than a lobe of the 
prickly pear or a joint of cholla. But he is nat- 
urally fond of green vegetation, and in the early 
morning he usually leaves the valley and climbs 
the mountains where with goats and mountain 
sheep be browses on the twigs of shrub and tree. 
The coyote likes water, too, but he puts up with 
sucking a nest of quail eggs, eating some mes- 
quite beans, or at best absorbing the blood from 
some rabbit. The wild cat will go for weeks 
without more moisture than the blood of birds 
or lizards, and then perhaps, after long thirst, 
he will come to a water pocket in the rocks to 
lap only a handful, doing it with an angry 
snarling snap as though he disliked it and was 
drinking under compulsion. The gray wolf 
is too much of a traveler to depend upon any 
one locality. He will run fifty miles in a night 
and be back before morning. Whether he 
gets water or not is not possible to ascertain. 
The badger, the coon, and the bear are very 
seldom seen in the more arid regions. They 
are not strictly speaking desert animals because 
unfitted to endure desert hardships. They are 
naturally great eaters and sleepers, loving cool 
weather and their own fatness ; and to that the 
desert is sharply opposed. There is nothing 



DESERT ANIMALS 



155 



fat in the land of sand and cactns. Animal 
life is lean and gannt ; if it sleeps at all it is with 
one eye open ; and as for heat it cares very lit- 
tle abont it. For the first law of the desert to 
which animal life of every kind pays allegiance 
is the law of endurance and abstinence. After 
that requirement is fulfilled special needs pro- 
duce the peculiar qualities and habits of the in- 
dividual. 

Yet there is one quality more general than 
special since almost everything possesses it, and 
that is ferocity — fierceness. The strife is des- 
perate ; the supply of food and moisture is 
small, the animal is very hungry and thirsty. 
What wonder then that there is the determi- 
nation of the starving in all desert life ! Every- 
thing pursues or is pursued. Every muscle is 
strung to the highest tension. The bounding 
deer must get away ; the swift-following wolf 
must not let him. The gray lizard dashes for 
a ledge of rock like a flash of light ; but the 
bayonet bill of the road runner must catch 
him before he gets there. Neither can afford 
to miss his mark. And that is perhaps the 
reason why there is so much development in 
special directions, so much fitness for a par- 
ticular purpose, so much equipment for the 



Lean, 
gaunt life. 



Fierceness 
of the 
animals. 



156 



THE DESERT 



Fitness/or 
attack and 



The wild- 



The spring 
of the cat. 



doing or the avoiding of death. Because the 
wild-cat cannot afford to miss his quarry, there- 
fore is he made a something that seldom does 
miss. 

The description of the lion as " a jaw on four 
paws " will fit the wild-cat very well— only he 
is a jaw on two paws. The hind legs are in- 
significant compared with the front ones, and 
the body back of the shoulders is lean, lank, 
slight, but withal muscular and sinewy. The 
head is bushy, heavy, and square, the neck and 
shoulders are massive, the forelegs and paws so 
large that they look to belong to some other an- 
imal. The ears are small yet sensitive enough 
to catch the least noise, the nose is acute, the 
eyes are like great mirrors, the teeth like points 
of steel. In fact the whole animal is little more 
than a machine for dragging down and devour- 
ing prey. That and the protection of his breed 
are his only missions on earth. He is the same 
creeping, snarling beast that one finds in the 
mountains of California, but the desert animal 
is larger and stronger. He sneaks upon a band 
of quail or a rabbit with greater caution, and 
when he springs and strikes it is with greater 
certainty. The enormous paws pin the game to 
the earth, and the sharp teeth cut through like 



DESEKT ANIMALS 



157 



knives. It is not more than once in two or 
three days that a meal comes within reach and 
he has no notion of allowing it to get away. 

The panther, or as he is more commonly 
called, the mountain lion, is no such square- 
built mass of muscle, no such bundle of energy 
as the wild-cat, though much longer and larger. 
The figure is wiry and serpentine, and has all the 
action and grace of the tiger. It is pre-eminently 
a figure for crouching, sneaking, springing, and 
dragging down. His struggle-f or-lif e is perhaps 
not so desperate as that of the cat because he lives 
high up in the desert mountains where game is 
more plentiful ; but he is a very good struggler 
for all that. Occasionally one hears his cry in 
the night (a cry that stops the yelp of the coyote 
very quickly and sets the ears of the jack-rabbit 
a-trembling) but he is seldom seen unless sought 
for. Even then the seeker does not usually 
care to look for him, or at him too long. He 
has the tiger eye, and his jaw and claw are too 
powerful to be trifled with. He will not attack 
one unless at bay or wounded ; but as a moun- 
tain prowler he is the terror of the young deer, 
the mountain sheep, and the rabbit family. 

One sees the gray wolf but little oftener than 
the mountain lion. Sometimes in the very 



The moun- 
tain lion. 



Habits of 
the moun 
tain lion. 



The gray 
wolf. 



158 



THE DESERT 



Home of 
the wolf. 



The coyote. 



early morning you may catch a glimpse of him 
sneaking up a mountain canyon, but he usually 
keeps out of sight. His size is great for a wolf 
— sometimes over six feet from nose to tail tip 
— but it lies mostly in length and bulk. He does 
not stand high on his feet and yet is a swift and 
long-winded runner. In this and in his strength 
of jaw lies his special equipment. He is not 
very cunning but he takes up and follows a 
trail, and runs the game to earth with consider- 
able perseverance. I have never seen anything 
but his footprints on the desert. Usually he 
keeps well up in the mountains and comes down 
on the plains only at night. He prefers prairie 
or table-land country, with adjacent stock 
ranges, to the desert, because there the hunting 
is not difficult. Sheep, calves, and pigs he will 
eat with some relish, but his favorite game is the 
young colt. He runs all his game and catches 
it as it runs like the true wolf that he is. Some- 
times he hunts in packs of half a dozen, but if 
there is no companionship he does not hesitate 
to hunt alone. 

The prairie wolf or coyote is not at all like 
the gray wolf. He seldom runs after things, 
though he does a good deal of running away 
from them. And he is a fairly good runner too. 



DESERT ANIMALS 



159 



But he does not win his living by his courage. 
His special gift is not the muscular energy that 
crushes at a blow ; nor the great strength that 
follows and tires and finally drags down. Nat- 
ure designed him with the wolf form and in- 
stinct, but gave him something of the clever- 
ness of the fox. It is by cunning and an 
obliging stomach that the coyote is enabled to 
eke out a living. He is cunning enough to 
know, for instance, that you cannot see him on 
a desert background as long as he does not 
move ; so he sits still at times for many min- 
utes, watching you from some little knoll. As 
long as he is motionless your eyes pass over him 
as a patch of sand or a weathered rock. When 
he starts to move, it is with some deliberation. 
He prefers a dog-trot and often several shots 
from your rifle will not stir him into a run. He 
slips along easily and gracefully — a lean, hungry- 
looking wretch with all the insolence of a hood- 
lum and all the shrewdness of a thief. He re- 
quires just such qualities together with a keen 
nose, good eyes and ears, and some swiftness of 
dash to make a living. The desert bill of fare 
is not all that a wolf could desire ; but the coyote 
is not very particular. Everything is food that 
comes to his jaws. He likes rabbit meat, but 



Cleverness 
of the 
coyote. 



160 



THE DESERT 



His subsist- 
ence. 



His back- 
ground. 



Ihefox 



does not often get it. For desert rabbits do 
not go to sleep with both eyes shut. Failing 
the rabbit he snuffs out birds and their nests, 
trails up anything sick or wounded, and in emer- 
gencies runs down and devours a lizard. If 
animal food is scarce he turns his attention to 
vegetation, eats prickly pears and mesquite 
beans ; and up in the mountains he stands on 
his hind legs and gathers choke cherries and 
manzanitas. With such precarious living he be- 
comes gaunt, leathery, muscled with whip-cord. 
There is a meagreness and a scantiness about him ; 
his coarse coat of hair is sun-scorched, his whole 
appearance is arid, dusty, sandy. There is no 
other animal so thoroughly typical of the desert. 
He belongs there, skulking along the arroyos 
and washes just as a horned toad belongs under 
a granite bowlder. That he can live there at all 
is due to Nature's gift to him of all-around clev- 
erness. 

The fox is usually accounted the epitome of 
animal cunning, but here in the desert he is 
not frequently seen and is usually thought less 
clever than the coyote. He prefers the foot- 
hills and the cover of dense chaparral where he 
preys upon birds, smells out the nest of the 
valley quail, catches a wood-rat ; or, if hard 



DESEET ANIMALS 



161 



pushed to it, makes a meal of crickets and grass- 
hoppers. But even at this he is not more facile 
than the coyote. Nor can he surpass the coyote 
in robbing a hen-roost and keeping out of a 
trap while doing it. He cuts no important fig- 
ure on the desert and, indeed, he is hardly a 
desert animal though sometimes found there. 
The conditions of existence are too severe for 
him. The strength of the cat, the legs of the 
wolf, and the stomach of the coyote are not his ; 
and so he prowls nearer civilization and takes 
more risk for an easier life. 

And the prey, what of the prey ! The ani- 
mals of the desert that furnish food for the 
meat eaters like the wolf and the cat — the ani- 
mals that cannot fight back or at least wage un- 
equal warfare — are they left hopelessly and help- 
lessly at the mercy of the destroyers ? Not so. 
Nature endows them and protects them as best 
she can. Every one of them has some device to 
baffle or trick the enemy. Even the poor little 
horned toad, that has only his not too thick 
skin to save him, can slightly change the color 
of that skin to suit the bowlder he is flattened 
upon so that the keenest eye would pass him 
over unnoticed. The jack-rabbit cannot change 
his skin, but he knows many devices whereby he 



The prey. 



Devices for 



162 



THE DESERT 



Senses of 
the rabbit. 



Speed of the 
jack-rabbit. 



contrives to save it. Lying in his form at the 
root of some bush or cactus he is not easily seen, 
He crouches low and the gray of his fur fits 
into the sand imperceptibly. You do not see 
him but he sees you. His eyes never close ; 
they are always watching. Look at them close- 
ly as he lies dead before you and how large and 
protruding they are ! In the life they see every- 
thing that moves. And if his eyes fail him, 
perhaps his ears will not. He was named the 
jackass-rabbit because of his long ears ; and the 
length of them is in exact proportion to their 
acuteness of hearing. No footstep escapes them. 
They are natural megaphones for the reception 
of sound. It can hardly be doubted that his nose 
is just as acute as his eyes and his ears. So 
that all told he is not an animal easily caught 
napping. 

And if the jack-rabbit's senses fail him, has 
he no other resource ? Certainly, yes ; that is if 
he is not captured. In proportion to his size 
he has the strongest hind legs of anything on 
the desert. In this respect he is almost like a 
kangaroo. When he starts running and begins 
with his long bound, there is nothing that can 
overtake him except a trained greyhound. He 
ricochets from knoll to knoll like a bounding 



DESERT ANIMALS 



163 



ball, and as he crosses ahead of you perhaps you 
think he is not moving very fast. But shoot at 
him and see how far behind him your rifle ball 
strikes the dust. No coyote or wolf is foolish 
enough to chase him or ever try to run him 
down. His endurance is quite as good as his 
speed. It makes no difference about his not 
drinking water and that all his energy comes 
from bark and dry grass. He keeps right on 
running ; over stones, through cactus, down a 
canyon, up a mountain. For keen senses and 
swift legs he is the desert type as emphatically 
as the coyote that is forever prowling on his 
track. 

The little " cotton-tail " rabbit is not perhaps 
so well provided for as the jack-rabbit ; but 
then he does not live in the open and is not so 
exposed to attack. He hides in brush, weeds, or 
grass ; and when startled makes a quick dash 
for a hole in the ground or a ledge of rock. His 
legs are good for a short distance, and his senses 
are acute ; but the wild-cat or the coyote catches 
him at last. The continuance of his species 
lies in prolific breeding. The wild-cat, too, 
catches a good many gophers, rats, mice, and 
squirrels. The squirrels are many in kind and 
beautiful in their forms and colorings. One 



His endur- 
ance. 



The "cotton- 
tail." 



164 



THE DESEET 



Squirrels 

and 

gophers. 



The desert 
antelope. 



Sis eyes. 



can hardly count them all — squirrels with long 
tails and short tails and no tails ; squirrels 
yellow, brown, gray, blue, and slate-colored. 
They live in the rocks about the bases of the 
desert mountains ; and eventually they fall a 
prey to the wild-cat who watches for them just 
as the domestic cat watches for the house rat. 
Their only safeguard is their energetic way of 
darting into a hole. For all their sharp noses 
and ears they are foolish little folk and will 
keep poking their heads out to see what is go- 
ing on. 

But for acute senses, swift legs, and powerful 
endurance nothing can surpass the antelope. 
He is rarely seen to-day (morels the pity !) ; but 
only a few years ago there were quite a number 
of them on the Sonora edge of the Colorado 
Desert. Usually they prefer the higher mesas 
where the land is grass-grown and the view is 
unobstructed ; but they have been known to 
come far down into the desert. And the ante- 
lope is very well fitted for the sandy waste. The 
lack of water does not bother him, he can eat 
anything that grows in grass or bush ; and he 
can keep from being eaten about as cleverly as 
any of the deer tribe. His eye alone is a marvel 
of development. It protrudes from the socket 



DESERT ANIMALS 



165 



— bulges out almost like the end of an egg — 
and if there were corners on the desert mesas 
I believe that eye could see around them. He 
cannot be approached in any direction without 
seeing what is going on ; but he may be still- 
hunted and shot from behind crag or cover. 

His curiosity is usually the death of him, be- 
cause he will persist in standing still and look- 
ing at things ; but his senses almost always give 
him fair warning. His nose and ears are just 
as acute as his eyes. And how he can run ! 
His legs seem to open and shut like the blades 
of a pocket-knife, so leisurely, so apparently 
effortless. But how they do take him over the 
ground ! With one leg shot from under him 
he runs pretty nearly as fast as before. A 
tougher, more wiry, more beautiful animal was 
never created. Perhaps that is the reason why 
every man's hand has been raised against him 
until now his breed is almost extinct. He was 
well fitted to survive on the desert mesas and 
the upland plains — a fine type of swiftness and 
endurance — but Nature in her economy never 
reckoned with the magazine rifle nor the greed 
of the individual who calls himself a sports- 
man. 

The mule-deer with his large ears, long muz- 



Sis nose 
and ears. 



His 
swiftness. 



166 



THE DESERT 



The 
mule-deer. 



Deer in 
flight. 



zle and keen eyes, is almost as well provided for 
as the antelope. He has survived the antelope 
possibly because he does not live in the open 
country. He haunts the brush and the rock 
cover of the gorge and the mountain side. 
There in the heavy chaparral he will skulk 
and hide while you may pass within a few feet 
of him. If he sees that he is discovered he 
can make a dash up or down the mountain in 
a way that astonishes. Stones, sticks, and brush 
have no terror for him. He jumps over them 
or smashes through them. He will bound 
across a talus of broken porphyry that will cut 
the toughest boots to pieces, striking all four 
feet with every bound, and yet not ruffle the 
hair around his dew claws ; or he will dash 
through a tough dry chaparral at full speed 
without receiving a scrape or a cut of any kind. 
The speed he attains on such ground aston- 
ishes again. His feet seem to strike rubber in- 
stead of stone ; for he bounds like a ball, de- 
scribes a quarter circle, and bounds again. The 
magazine of your rifle may be emptied at him ; 
and still he may go on, gayly cutting quarter 
circles, until he disappears over the ridge. He 
is one of the hardiest of the desert progeny. 
The lack of water affects him little. He browses 



DESERT ANIMALS 



167 



and gets fat on twigs and leaves that seem to 
have as little nutriment about them as a tele- 
graph-pole ; and he lies down on a bed of stones 
as upon a bed of roses. He is as tough as 
the goats and sheep that keep well up on the 
high mountain ridges ; and in cleverness is per- 
haps superior to the antelope. But oftentimes 
he will turn around to have a last look, and 
therein lies his undoing. In Sonora there is 
found a dwarf deer — a foolish if pretty little 
creature — and along river-beds the white-tailed 
deer is occasionally seen ; but these deer with 
the goats and the sheep hardly belong to the 
desert, though living upon its confines. 

In fact, none of the far-travelling animals lives 
right down in the desert gravel-beds continu- 
ously. They go there at night or in the early 
morning, but in the daytime they are usually 
found in the neighboring hills. The rabbits, 
rats, and squirrels, if undisturbed, will usually 
stay upon the flat ground ; and there is also an- 
other variety of desert life that does not wander 
far from the sand and the rocks. I mean the 
reptiles. They are not as a class swift in 
flight, nor over-clever in sense, nor cunning in 
devices. Nor have they sufficient strength to 
grapple and fight with the larger animals. It 



Habits of 
the desert- 
deer. 



The white- 
tail. 



The 
reptiles. 



168 



THE DESEET 



Poison of 
reptiles. 



Thefang 
and sting. 



would seem as though Nature had brought 
them into the desert only half made-up — a prey 
to every beast and bird. But no ; they are 
given the most deadly weapon of defence of all 
— poison. Almost all of the reptiles have poison 
about them in fang or sting. We are accus- 
tomed to label them " poisonous " or " not poi- 
sonous," as they kill or do not kill a human 
being ; but that is not the proper criterion by 
which to judge. The bite of the trap-door 
spider will not seriously affect a man, but it 
will kill a lizard in a few minutes. In propor- 
tion to his size the common red ant of the 
desert is more poisonous than the rattlesnake. 
It is reiterated with much positiveness that a 
swarm of these ants have been known to kill 
men. There is, however, only one reptile on the 
desert that humanity need greatly fear on ac- 
count of his poison and that is the rattlesnake. 
There are several varieties called in local par- 
lance "side-winders," "ground rattlers," and 
the like ; but the ordinary spotted, brown, or 
yellow rattlesnake is the type. He is not a 
pleasant creature, but then he is not often met 
with. In travelling many hundreds of miles on 
the desert I never encountered more than half a 
dozen. 



DESEET ANIMALS 



169 



The rattle is indescribable, but a person will 
know it the first time he hears it. It is some- 
thing between a buzz and a burr, and can 
cause a cold perspiration in a minute fraction 
of time. The snake is very slow in getting 
ready to strike, in fact sluggish ; but once the 
head shoots out, it does so with the swiftness of 
an arrow. Nothing except the road-runner can 
dodge it. The poison is deadly if the fang has 
entered a vein or a fleshy portion of the body 
where the flow of blood to the heart is free. If 
struck on the hand or foot, the man may re- 
cover, because the circulation there is slow and 
the heart has time to repel the attack. Every 
animal on the desert knows just how venomous 
is that poison. Even your dog knows it by in- 
stinct. He may shake and kill garter-snakes, 
but he will not touch the rattlesnake. 

All of the spider family are poisonous and 
you can find almost every one of them on the 
desert. The most sharp-witted of the family is 
the trap-door spider — the name coming from 
the door which he hinges and fastens over the 
entrance of his hole in the ground. The taran- 
tula is simply an overgrown spider, very heavy 
in weight, and inclined to be slow and stupid 
in action. He is a ferocious-looking wretch 



The rattle- 
snake. 



Effect of the 
poison. 



Spiders and 
tarantulas. 



170 



THE DESERT 



Centipedes 

and 

scorpions. 



Lizards 
and swifts. 



The hydro- 
phobia 
skunk. 



and has a ferocious bite. It makes an ngly 
wound and is deadly enough to small animals. 
The scorpion has the reputation of being very 
venomous ; but his sting on the hand amounts 
to little more than that of an ordinary wasp. 
Nor is the long-bodied, many-legged, rather 
graceful centipede so great a poison-carrier as 
has been alleged. They are all of them poi- 
sonous, but in varying degrees. Doubtless the 
(to us) harmless horned toads and the swifts 
have for their enemies some venom in store. 

The lizards are many in variety, and their 
colors are often very beautiful in grays, yellows, 
reds, blues, and indigoes. The Gila monster 
belongs to their family, though he is much 
larger. The look of him is very forbidding and 
he has an ugly way of hissing at you ; but just 
how venomous he is I do not know. Very 
likely there is some poison about him, though 
this has been denied. It would seem that every- 
thing that cannot stand or run or hide must 
be defended somehow. Even the poor little 
skunk when he comes to live on the desert de- 
velops poisoned teeth and his bite produces 
what is called hydrophobia. The truth about 
the hydrophobia skunk is, I imagine, that he is 
an eater of carrion ; and when he bites a per- 



DESERT ANIMALS 



171 



son he is likely to produce blood-poisoning, 
which is miscalled hydrophobia. 

Taking them for all in all, they seem like a 
precious pack of cutthroats, these beasts and 
reptiles of the desert. Perhaps there never was 
a life so nurtured in violence, so tutored in at- 
tack and defence as this. The warfare is con- 
tinuous from the birth to the death. Every- 
thing must fight, fly, feint, or use poison ; and 
every slayer eventually becomes a victim. What 
a murderous brood for Nature to bring forth ! 
And what a place she has chosen in which to 
breed them ! Not only the struggle among 
themselves, but the struggle with the land, 
the elements — the eternal fighting with heat, 
drouth, and famine. What else but fierceness 
and savagery could come out of such condi- 
tions ? 

But, after all, is there not something in the 
sheer brute courage that endures, worthy of our 
admiration ? These animals have made the best 
out of the worst, and their struggle has given 
them a physical character which is, shall we 
not say, beautiful ? Perhaps you shudder at the 
thought of a panther dragging down a deer — 
one enormous paw over the deer's muzzle, one 
on his neck, and the strain of all the back mus- 



The 

cutthroat 

band. 



The 

eternal 

struggle. 



Brute 
courage. 



172 



THE DESERT 



Brute 
character. 



Beauty in 
character. 



Graceful 
forms of 
animals. 



cles coming into play. But was not that the 
purpose for which the panther was designed ? 
As a living machine how wonderfully he works! 
Look at the same subject done in bronze by 
Barye and you will see what a revelation of 
character the great statuary thought it. Look, 
too, at Barye's wolf and fox, look at the lions of 
Gericault, and the tigers and serpents of Dela- 
croix ; and with all the jaw and poison of them 
how beautiful they are ! 

You will say they are made beautiful through 
the art of the artists, and that is partly true ; 
but we are seeing only what the artists saw. 
And how did they come to choose such sub- 
jects ? Why, simply because they recognized 
that for art there is no such thing as nobility or 
vulgarity of subject. Everything may be fit if 
it possesses character. The beautiful is the 
characteristic — the large, full-bodied, well-ex- 
pressed truth of character. At least that is one 
very positive phase of beauty. 

Even the classic idea of beauty, which re- 
gards only the graceful in form or movement 
or the sensuous in color, finds types among 
these desert inhabitants. The dullest person 
in the arts could not but see fine form and pro- 
portion in the panther, graceful movement in 



DESERT ANIMALS 



173 



the antelope, and charm of color in all the 
pretty rock squirrels. For myself, being some- 
what prejudiced in favor of this drear waste 
and its savage progeny, I may confess to hav- 
ing watched the flowing movements of snakes, 
their coil and rattle and strike, many times and 
with great pleasure ; to having stretched my- 
self for hours upon granite bowlders while fol- 
lowing the play of indigo lizards in the sand ; 
to having traced with surprise the slightly 
changing skin of the horned toad produced by 
the reflection of different colors held near him. 
I may also confess that common as is the jack- 
rabbit he never bursts away in speed before me 
without being followed by my wonder at his 
graceful mystery of motion ; that the crawl of 
a wild-cat upon game is something that arrests 
and fascinates by its masterful skill ; and that 
even that desert tramp, the coyote, is entitled 
to admiration for the graceful way he can slip 
through patches of cactus. The fault is not in 
the subject. It is not vulgar or ugly. The 
trouble is that we perhaps have not the prop- 
er angle of vision. If we understood all, we 
should admire all. 



Colors of 
lizards. 



Mystery of 
motion,. 



The first 
day's walk. 



Tracks in 
the sand. 



CHAPTER X 
WINGED LIFE 

The desert's secrets of life and growth and 
death are not to be read at a glance. The first 
day's walk is usually a disappointment. You 
see little more than a desolate waste. The 
light of the blue sky, the subtle color of the air, 
the roll of the valleys, the heave of the moun- 
tains do not reveal themselves at once. The 
vegetation you think looks like a thin covering 
of dry sticks. And as for the animals, the birds 
— the living things on the desert — they are not 
apparent at all. 

But the casual stroll does not bring you to 
the end of the desert's resources. You may 
perhaps walk for a whole day and see not a beast 
or a bird of any description. Yet they are here. 
Even in the lava-beds where not even cactus 
will grow, and where to all appearance there is 
no life whatever, you may see tracks in the sand 
where quail and road-runners and linnets have 
been running about in search of food. There 
174 



WINGED LIFE 



175 



are tracks, too, of the coyote and the wild-cat — 
tracks following tracks. The animals and the 
birds belong to the desert or the neighboring 
mountains ; but they are not always on view. 
You meet with them only in the early morning 
and evening when they are moving about. In 
the middle of the day they are in the shadow of 
bush or rock or lying in some cut bank or cave 
— keeping out of the direct rays of the sun. 
The birds are not very numerous even when 
they come forth. They prefer places that afford 
better cover. And yet as you make a memo- 
randum of each new bird you see you are sur- 
prised after a time to find how many are the 
varieties. 

And the surprise grows when you think of 
the dangers and hardships that continually har- 
ass bird-life here in the desert. It may be 
fancied perhaps that the bird is exempt from 
danger because he has wings to carry him out 
of the reach of the animals ; but we forget that 
he has enemies of his own kind in the air. And 
if he avoids the hawks by day, how shall he 
avoid the owls by night ? Where at night shall 
he go for protection ? There are no broad- 
leaved trees to offer a refuge — in fact few trees 
of any sort. The bushes are not so high that 



Scarcity of 
birds. 



Bangers of 
bird-life. 



No cover for 
protection. 



176 



THE DESERT 



The food 
problem. 



The heat 
and drouth 



a coyote cannot reach to their top at a jump ; 
nor are the spines and ledges of rock in the 
mountains so steep that a wild-cat cannot climb 
np them. 

No ; the bird is subject to the same dangers 
as the animals and the plants. Something is 
forever on his trail. He must always be on 
guard. And the food problem, ever of vital 
interest to bird-life, bothers him just as much 
as it does the coyote. There is little for him 
to eat and nothing for him to drink ; and hard- 
ly a resting-place for the sole of his foot. Be- 
sides, it would seem as though he should be af- 
fected by the intense heat more than he is in 
reality. Humanity at times has difficulty in 
withstanding this heat, for though it is not 
suffocating, it parches the mouth and dries up 
the blood so rapidly that if water is not attain- 
able the effect is soon apparent. The animals 
— that is, the wild ones — are never fazed by it ; 
but the domestic horse, dog, and cow yield to 
it almost as readily as a man. And men and 
animals are all of low-blood temperature — a 
man's normal temperature being about 98 F. 
But what of the bird in his coat of feathers 
which may add to or detract from his warmth ? 
What is his normal temperature ? It varies 



WINGED LIFE 



177 



with the species, so far as I can ascertain by ex- 
periment, from 112 to 120 F. Consider that 
blood temperature in connection with a sur- 
rounding air varying from 100 to 125 F. ! It 
would seem impossible for any life to support 
it. One may well wonder what strange wings 
beat this glowing air, what bird-life lives in this 
fiery waste ! 

Yet the desert-birds look not very different 
from their cousins of the woods and streams 
except that they are thinner, more subdued in 
color, somewhat more alert. They are very 
pretty, very innocent-looking birds. But we 
may be sure that living here in the desert, en- 
during its hardships and participating in its in- 
cessant struggle for life and for the species, they 
have just the same savage instincts as the plants 
and the animals. The sprightliness and the 
color may suggest harmlessness ; but the eye, 
the beak, the claw are designed for destruction. 
The road-runner is one of the mildest-looking 
and most graceful birds of the desert, but the 
spring of the wild-cat to crush down a rabbit is 
not more fierce than the snap of the bird's beak 
as he tosses a luckless lizard. He is the only 
thing on the desert that has the temerity to 
fight a rattlesnake. It is said that he kills the 



A bird's 
tempera- 



Innocent- 
looking 
birds with 
savage 
instincts. 



The road- 
runner. 



178 



THE DESERT 



Wrens and 
fly-catchers. 



Develop- 
ment of 
special 
characteris- 
tics. 



snake, but as to that I am not able to give evi- 
dence. 

And it is not alone the bird of prey — not 
alone the road-runners, the eagles, the vult- 
ures, the hawks, and the owls that are savage 
of mood. Every little wisp of energy that 
carries a bunch of feathers is endowed with the 
same spirit. The downward swoop of the cac- 
tus wren upon a butterfly and the snip of his 
little scissors bill, the dash after insects of the 
fly-catchers, vireos, swallows, bats, and whip- 
poor-wills are just as murderous in kind as the 
blow of the condor and the vice-like clutch of 
his talons as they sink into the back of a rab- 
bit. Skill and strength in the chase are abso- 
lutely necessary in a desert where food is so 
scarce, and in proportion the little birds have 
these qualities in common with the great. 

And naturally, as in the case of the animals, 
the skill and the strength develop along the line 
of the bird's needs, producing that quality of 
character, that fitness for the work cut out for 
him, to which we have so often referred. There 
are birds that belong almost solely to the king- 
dom of the air — birds like the condor, the 
vulture, and the eagle. Upon the ground they 
move awkwardly, not having better feet to 



WINGED LIFE 



179 



walk with than ducks and geese. The talons 
are too much developed for walking. When 
they rise from the ground they do it heavily 
and with quick flapping wings. Not until 
they are fairly started in the upper air do 
they show what wonderful wing-power they 



The common brown-black vulture or turkey 
buzzard is the type of all the wheelers and sail- 
ers. The " soaring eagle " of poetry is some- 
thing of a goose beside him. For the wings of 
the vulture bear him through wind, sun, and 
heat, hour after hour, without a pause. To 
see him circling as he hunts down a mountain 
range a hundred miles or more, one might 
think that the abnormal breast-muscles never 
grew weary. He goes over every foot of the 
ground with his eyes and at the same time 
watches every other vulture in the sky. Let 
one of his fellows stop circling and drop earth- 
ward on a long incline, and immediately he is 
followed by all the black crew. They know 
instantly that something has been discovered. 
But often the hunt is in vain, and then for 
whole days at a time those motionless wings 
bear their burden apparently without fatigue. 
With no food perhaps for a fortnight and 



Birds of the 
air. 



The 

brown-black 
vulture. 



The vulture 
hunting. 



180 



THE DESERT 



The vulture 
sailing. 



The 

southern 

buzzard. 



The crow. 



never any water, that spare rack of muscles 
sails the air with as little effort as floating 
thistle-down. No one knows just how it is 
done. In blow or calm, against the wind or 
with it, high in the bine or low over the 
ground, any place, anywhere, and under any 
circumstances those wings cut through the air 
almost like sunlight. You can hear a whizz 
like the flight of arrows as the bird passes 
close over your head ; but you cannot see the 
slightest motion in the feathers. 

The hot, thin air of the desert would seem a 
less favorable air for sailing than the moister 
atmosphere of the south ; but the vulture of 
the tropics is not the equal of the desert-bird. 
He is heavier, lazier, and more stupid — possi- 
bly because better fed. There are several vari- 
eties in the family, the chief variants being the 
one with white tipped wings and the one with 
a white eagle-like head. Neither of them is as 
good on the wing as the black species, though 
none of them is to be despised. Even the or- 
dinary carrion crow of the desert is an expert 
sailer compared with any of the crow family to 
be found elsewhere. The exigencies of the sit- 
uation seem to require wings developed for long- 
distance flights ; and the vultures, the crows, 



WINGED LIFE 



181 



the eagles, the hawks, all respond after their 
individual fashions. 

The condor is perhaps the vulture's peer 
in the matter of sailing. He belongs to the 
vulture family, though very much larger than 
any of its members, sometimes measuring 
fifteen feet across the wings and weighing forty 
pounds. He is the largest bird on the conti- 
nent. At the present time he is occasionally 
seen wheeling high in air like a mere insect in 
the great blue dome. It is said that he soars 
as high as twentyfive thousand feet above the 
earth. But to-day he sails alone and his tribe 
has grown less year by year. With the eagles 
he keeps well up in the high sierras and builds 
a nest on the inaccessible peaks or along the 
steep escarpments. He belongs to the desert 
only because it is one of his hunting-grounds. 

This may be said of the eagles and the hawks. 
They hunt the desert by day, but go home to 
the mountains at night. The owls are some- 
what different, not being given to long flight. 
The deep caves or wind-worn recesses under 
mountain ledges furnish them abiding-places. 
These caves also send forth at dusk a full com- 
plement of bats that seem not different from 
the ordinary Eastern bats. The burrowing 



The great 
condor. 



The eagles 
and hawks. 



182 



THE DESERT 



Bats and 
owls. 



The burrow- 
ing owl. 



owl is perhaps misnamed, though not misplaced. 
There is no evidence whatever, that I have ever 
seen or heard, to show that he burrows. What 
happens is that he crawls into some hole that is 
already burrowed instead of a cave or recess in 
the rocks. A prairie-dog or badger hole is his 
preference. That the place has inhabitants, 
including the tarantula and (it is said) the rat- 
tlesnake, does not bother the owl. He walks 
in with his mate and speedily makes himself at 
home. How the different families get on to- 
gether can be imagined by one person as well as 
by another. They do not seem to pay any at- 
tention to each other so far as I have observed. 
Ordinarily the desert animals, birds, and rep- 
tiles agree to no such truce. They are at war 
from the start. I do not know that the owls, 
the bats, the night-hawks have any special 
equipment for carrying on their part of the 
war. Sometimes I have fancied they had larger 
eyes than is usual with their kinds outside of 
the desert ; but I have no proof of this. Per- 
haps it is like the speculation as to whether the 
buzzard sees or scents the carrion that he dis- 
covers so readily — hardly amenable to proof. 

All of the air-birds are strikingly developed 
in the wings and equally undeveloped in the 



WINGED LIFE 



183 



feet, while all the ground-birds of the desert 
are just the reverse of this — that is, deficient in 
wings but strong of foot and leg. The road- 
runner, or as he is sometimes called the chap- 
arralcock, is a notable instance of this. He is 
a lizard-eater, and in order to eat he must first 
catch his lizard. Now this is by no means an 
easy task. The ordinary gray, brown, or yel- 
low lizard is the swiftest dodger and darter 
there is in the sand, and even in straight-line 
running he will travel too fast for an ordinary 
dog to catch him. His facility, too, in dashing 
up, over, and under bowlders is not to be under- 
estimated. The road-runner's task then is not 
an easy one, and yet he seems to accomplish it 
easily. There is no great effort about his pur- 
suit and yet he generally manages to catch the 
lizard. It is because his legs are specially con- 
structed for running, and his head, neck, and 
beak for darting. His wings are of little use. 
When chased by a dog he will finally take to 
them, but only for about fifty yards. Then he 
drops to the ground and starts on foot again. 
He will run away from a man, and sometimes 
even a horse cannot keep up with him. Oddly 
enough, he seems always to run a little side- 
ways. The long tail (used as a rudder) is car- 



The ground 
birds. 



The road- 
runner's 
swiftness. 



184 



THE DESEKT 



The vicious 
beak. 



The desert- 
quail. 



Wings of 
the quaU. 



ried a little to the right or the left and gives 
this impression. When frightened, his top-knot 
is raised like that of the pheasant, and he often 
runs with his beak open. It is a most vicious 
beak for all that it looks not more blood-thirsty 
than that of the crow. It snaps through a 
scorpion or a centipede like a pair of sheep- 
shearers. And with all his energy and strength 
the road-runner weighs only about a pound. 
He is a long-geared bird, but not actually any 
larger than a pigeon. 

The blue valley-quail — whether of Arizona or 
California breeding — is quite as strong of leg as 
the road-runner, though not perhaps so swift. 
He does not care much about using his wings ; 
and at best they are not better than the rather 
poor average of quails' wings. By that I mean 
that all quails rise from cover with a great roar 
and bustle, and they fly very fast for a short 
distance ; but they are soon down upon the 
ground, running and hiding. The flight of the 
quail, too, is straight ahead. It is not possible 
for him to rise up over five hundred feet of 
canyon wall, for instance, and even on an ordi- 
nary mountain side he takes several flights be- 
fore he reaches the summit. The wings are 
not muscled like the legs, and that is because 



WINGED LIFE 



185 



the quail is a ground-bird. He gets his food 
there and spends most of his time there. In 
the East Bob White always roosts upon the 
ground, but the desert-quail is usually too 
clever to trust himself in such an exposed place. 
He will travel miles to get into a cotton-wood 
tree at dusk, and if there is water near at hand 
so much the better. He dearly loves the water 
and the tree, but if he cannot get them he ac- 
cepts the situation philosophically and goes to 
sleep on a high ledge of rock with water per- 
haps in his thought but not in his crop. 

Thanks to his capacity for travelling, the 
quail usually manages to get enough of small 
seeds and insects to keep himself alive. He is 
a great roamer — in the course of a day travel- 
ling over many miles of country — and his quest 
is always food. He likes to be among the great 
bowlders that lie along the bases of the moun- 
tains ; and when disturbed he flies and jumps 
from rock to rock, much to the discouragement 
of the coyote that happens to be the disturber. 
When forced to rise he flies perhaps for a hun- 
dred yards or more and then drops and begins 
running. In the spring he mates, raises a 
brood, and teaches the young ones the gentle 
art of running. In the fall he and his family 



Travelling 
for water. 



Habits of 
quail. 



186 



THE DESERT 



His strong 
legs. 



Bush-birds. 



of a dozen or sixteen join with other families 
to make a great covey of several hundred, or in 
the old days before the market-hunters came, 
several thousand. And they all run. The 
bottom of the quaiPs foot is always itching for 
the ground ; and he seems never so happy as 
when leaving the enemy far behind him. His 
little legs take him through the brush so fast 
that you cannot keep up with him. Every 
muscle in him is as tough as a watch-spring. 
You may wound him, but you have not yet got 
him. He will creep into some cactus patch or 
crawl down a snake-hole — elude you in some 
way — and in the end die game just out of your 
reach. 

There are few trees upon the desert and few 
bushes of any size ; yet there are birds of the 
tree and the bush here just as there are birds 
of the air and the ground. The most of them 
seem the same kind of linnets, sparrows, and 
thrushes that are seen along the California 
coast ; though probably they have some peculiar 
desert characteristic. I cannot see any differ- 
ence between the little woodpeckers here and 
the woodpeckers elsewhere ; yet this desert va- 
riety flies from sahuaro to sahuaro, alights on 
the spiny trunk with a little thump, and im- 



WINGED LIFE 



187 



mediately begins hitching himself up through 
the worst imaginable rows of needles just as 
though he were climbing a plain pine-tree. 
The ordinary turtle-dove with his red pigeon- 
feet alights on the top of the same sahuaro, 
the wren bores holes in it and makes a nest 
within the cylinder ; and the dwarf thrush 
dashes in and out of tangled thickets of cholla 
all day long, and yet none of them suffers any 
injury. It seems incredible that birds not ac- 
customed to the desert could do such things. 

Possibly, too, these bush-birds — insect-de- 
vourers most of them — have some special faculty 
for catching their prey, though I have not been 
able to discover it. The fly-catchers, the mock- 
ing-birds, the finches, in a land of plenty are 
quick enough in breaking the back of a butter- 
fly or beetle, and any extra energy would seem 
superfluous. Still there is no telling what fine 
extra stimulus lies in an empty crop. And 
crops are usually empty on the desert. Even 
the little humming-bird has difficulty in pick- 
ing a living. In blossom time he is, of course, 
in fine condition, but I have seen him dashing 
about in the fall when nothing at all was in 
bloom, and evidently none the worse for some 
starvation. He is a swifter flyer than the or- 



The wood- 
peckers and 
cactus. 



Finches and 
mocking- 
birds. 



The hum- 
ming-bird. 



188 



THE DESERT 



Doves and 
grosbeaks. 



The lark 
and flicker. 



dinary bird and is also duller in coloring, but 
in other respects he seems not different. He 
breeds on the desert, building his nest in the 
pitahaya ; and he and his mate then have a 
standing quarrel with their neighbors for the 
rest of the summer. There is not in the whole 
feathered tribe a more quarrelsome scrap of 
vivacity than the humming-bird. 

The dwarf dove common to Sonora, the 
oven-bird, the red grosbeak, and many other 
of the smaller birds known to civilization, are 
found on the desert ; but apparently with no 
special faculty for overcoming its hardships. 
This is due perhaps to the fact that they are 
not always there — are not exclusively desert- 
birds. Nor do any of the migratory birds be- 
long to the desert, though they stop here for 
weeks at a time in their nights north or south. 
At almost any season of the year one sees the 
cow-blackbird and the smaller crow-blackbird. 
The mocking-bird comes only in the spring 
and fall, and the lark in early summer. The 
lark looks precisely like the Eastern bird, but 
his note is changed ; whereas the flicker has 
changed the color under his wings from yel- 
low to pink, but not his note. The robin is 
no whit different from the front-lawn robin of 



WINGED LIFE 



189 



our childhood ; and the bobolink rising from 
salt-bnsh and yucca, singing as he rises, is the 
bobolink of ancient days. At times there are 
troops of magpies that come and go across the 
waste, and at other times troops of blue-jays. 
And high in air through the warmth of spring 
and the cold of autumn there are great flocks 
of ducks, geese, brant, divers, shags, willet, 
curlew, swinging along silently to the southern 
or northern waterways. They seldom pause, 
even when following the Colorado Kiver, unless 
in need of water. On the mesas and uplands 
one sometimes sees a group of sand-hill cranes 
walking about and indulging in a crazy dance 
peculiarly their own, but the sight is no lon- 
ger a common one. 

And again the prey — what of the prey ? Has 
Nature left the beetles, the bugs, the worms, 
the bees, completely at the pleasure of the bird's 
beak ? No ; not completely, though it must 
be acknowledged that she has not provided 
much defensive armor for them individually. 
She incases her beautiful blue and yellow 
beetles in hard shells that other insects cannot 
break through, but they are flimsy defences 
against the mocking-bird. To bugs and worms 
and bees she gives perhaps a sting, deadly 



Jays and 
magpies. 



Water-fowl. 



Beetles and 
worms. 



190 



THE DESERT 



Fighting 
destruction 
by breed. 



The blue 
and green 
beetles. 



enough when thrust into a spider, but useless 
again when used in defence against a cactus- 
thrush. And this is where Nature shows her 
absolute indifference to the life or the death of 
the individual. She allows the bugs and beetles 
to be slaughtered like the mackerel in the sea. 
But she is a little more careful about preserving 
the species. And how does she do this without 
preserving the individual ? Why, simply by 
increasing the number of individuals, by breed, 
by fertility, by multiplicity. Thousands are 
annually slaughtered ; yes, but thousands are 
annually bred. What matter about their lives 
or deaths provided they do not increase or de- 
crease as a species ! 

The insects on the desert are mere flashes of 
life — pin-points of energy — but not without pur- 
pose and not without beauty. The beasts and 
the birds may be bleached brown or gray by the 
sun ; but the insects are many of them as gay 
as those of the tropics. The ordinary beetles 
that a chance turn of a stone reveals are like 
scarabs of gold, turquoise, azurite, bronze, 
platinum, hurrying and scurrying out of the 
wa}'. The tarantula-wasp, with his gorgeous 
orange-colored body and his blue wings, is like a 
bauble made of precious stones flickering along 



WINGED LIFE 



191 



the ground. The great dragon-fly with his 
many lensed eyes, the bees with black and yel- 
low bodies, the butterflies with bright-hued 
wings, the white and gray millers — all of them 
dwellers in the sands — are spots of light and 
color that illumine the desert as the rich jewel 
the Ethiop's ear. The wings of gauze that 
bear the ordinary fly upon the air, the feet of 
ebony that carry the plain black beetle along the 
rocks, are made with just as much care and skill 
as the wings of the condor and the foot of the 
road-runner. Nature in every product of her 
hand shows the completeness of her workman- 
ship. She made the wings and the legs for a 
purpose and they fulfil that purpose. They 
are without flaw and above reproach. Once 
more, therefore, have they character and fitness, 
and once more, therefore, are they beautiful. 

I need not now argue beauty in the birds, 
the beetles, and the butterflies. You will admit 
it without argument. The slate-blue of the 
quail, the gay red of the grosbeak, the charm 
of the rock-wren, the vivacity of the bobolink or 
the scale-runner, captivate you and compel your 
sympathy and admiration. Yes ; but everyone 
of them is, after his kind, as much of a butcher, 
just as much of a destroyer, as the wild-cat or 



Butterflies. 



Design and 
character. 



Beauty of 
birds. 



192 



THE DESERT 



Beauty also 
of reptiles. 



Nature's 
work all 
purposeful. 



the yellow rattlesnake. And they have no more 
character and perhaps less fitness for the desert 
life than the sneaking coyote or the flattened 
lizard which yon do not admire. Bnt why are 
not the coyote and the lizard beantifnl too ? 
Why not the beauty of the horned toad and the 
serpent ? Are we never to love or to admire 
save where form and color tickle the eye ? Are 
these forever to monopolize the name of beauty 
and gather to themselves the world's applause ? 
If we could but rid ourselves of the false ideas, 
which, taken en masse, are called education, we 
should know that there is nothing ugly under 
the sun, save that which comes from human 
distortion. Nature's work is all of it good, all 
of it purposeful, all of it wonderful, all of it 
beautiful. We like or dislike certain things 
which may be a way of expressing our prejudice 
or our limitation ; but the work is always per- 
fect of its kind irrespective of human appreci- 
ation. We may prefer the sunlight to the star- 
light, the evening primrose to the bisnaga, the 
antelope to the mountain-lion, the mocking-bird 
to the lizard ; but to say that one is good and 
the other bad, that one is beautiful and the other 
ugly, is to accuse Nature herself of preference — 
something which she never knew. She designs 



WINGED LIFE 



193 



for the cactus of the desert as skilfully and as 
faithfully as for the lily of the garden. Each 
in its way is suited to its place, and each in its 
way has its unique beauty of character. And 
so, more truly perhaps than Shakespeare him- 
self knew, the toad called ugly and venomous, 
still holds a precious jewel in its head. 



Precious 
jewel of the 
toad. 



Flat steps of 
the desert. 



Across 

Southern 

Arizona. 



CHAPTER XI 
MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 

The word mesa (table), by local usage in 
Mexico and in the western United States, is 
applied to any flat tract of ground that lies 
above an arroyo or valley, as well as to the flat 
top of a mountain. In a broad, if somewhat 
strained use of the word, it also means the 
great table-lands and elevated plains lying be- 
tween a river-valley and the mountain confines 
on either side of it. The mesas are the steps 
or benches that lead upward from the river 
to the mountain, though the resemblance to 
benches is not always apparent because of the 
cuttings and washings of intermittent streams, 
and the breakings and crossings of mountain- 
spurs. 

As you rise up from the Colorado Desert, 
crossing the river to the east, you meet with a 
great plain or so-called mesa that extends far 
across Southern Arizona and Sonora almost up 
to the Continental Divide. It is broken by 
194 



MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



195 



short ranges of barren mountains, that have 
the general trend of the main Sierra Madre, 
and it looks so much like the country to the 
west of the river that it is usually recognized 
as a part of the desert, or at the least " desert 
country." 

It is, however, somewhat different from the 
Bottom of the Bowl or even the valleys of the 
Mojave. The elevation, for one thing, gives it 
another character. The rise from bench to 
bench is very gradual, and to the ordinary ob- 
server hardly perceptible ; but nevertheless when 
the foot-hills of the Santa Rita Mountains are 
reached, the altitude is four thousand feet or 
more. There is a difference in light, sky, 
color, air ; even some change in the surface of 
the earth. The fine sands of the lower desert 
and the sea-bed silts are missing ; the mesas lie 
close up to the mountains and receive the first 
coarse wash from the sides ; the barrancas on 
the mountain - sides are choked with great 
masses of fallen rock, with bowlders of granite, 
with blocks of blackened lava. The arroyos 
that carry the wash from the mountains — mere 
ditches and trenches cut through the mesas — 
are filled with rounded stones, coarse sands, 
glittering scales of mica, bits of quartz, breaks 



Rising up 
from the 
desert. 



The great 



196 



THE DESERT 



" Grease 

wood" 

plains. 



Upland 
vegetation. 



of agate and carnelian. The mesas themselves 
are made up of sand and gravel, sometimes 
long shelvings of horizontal rocks, sometimes 
patches of terra-cotta, rifts of copper shale, 
or beds of parti-colored clay. 

There is more rain in this upland country 
and consequently more vegetation than down 
below. Grease wood grows everywhere and is 
the principal green thing in sight. So pre- 
dominant is it that the term "grease wood 
plains" is not inappropriate to the whole re- 
gion. Groves of sahuaro stand in the valleys 
and reach up and over the mountain-tops, 
chollas and nopals are on the flats ; the mes- 
quite grows in miniature forests. But besides 
these there are bushes and trees not seen in the 
basin. Palo fierro, palo bianco, cottonwood 
live along the dry river-beds, white and black 
sage on the mesas, white and black oaks in the 
foot-hills. Then, too, there are patches of pale 
yellow sun-dried grass covering many acres, 
great beds of evening primrose, and fields cov- 
ered with the purple salt-bush. It is quite an- 
other country when you come to examine it 
piece by piece. 

As you rise higher and higher to the Conti- 
nental Divide the whole face of the mesa under- 



MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



197 



goes a further change. It slips imperceptibly 
into a grass plain, stretching flat as far as the 
eye can see, covered with whitened grass, and 
marked by clumps of yuccas slowly growing 
into yucca palms. No rocks, trees, cacti, or 
grease wood ; no primrose, wild gourd, or ver- 
bena. Nothing but yucca palms, bleached 
grass, blue sky, and lilac mountains. It is still 
in kind a desert country, and it is still called a 
mesa or table-land ; but its character is changed 
into something like the great flat lands of Ne- 
braska or the broken plateau country of Mon- 
tana. 

In the spring, when the snows have melted 
and the rains have fallen, these plains turn 
green with young grass and are spattered with 
great patches of wild-flowers ; but the drouth 
and heat of early summer soon fade the grasses 
to a bright yellow, and in the fall the yellow 
bleaches to a dead white. There is little wild 
life left upon these plains. The bush-birds 
need more cover than is to be found here, while 
the ground-birds need more open roadway. 
In the spring, when the prairie pools are filled 
with water, there are geese and cranes in abun- 
dance ; but they soon pass on north. These 
great grass tracts were once the home of count- 



Grass 

plains. 



Spring and 
summer on 
the plains. 



198 



THE DESEET 



Home of the 
antelope. 



Beds of 
soda and 
gypsum. 



Riding into 
the unex- 
pected. 



less bands of antelope, for it is just such an 
open country as the antelope loves ; but they 
have passed on, too. In their place roam 
herds of cattle, and the gray wolf, the coyote, 
and the buzzard follow the herds. 

The grease wood and the grass plains of Ari- 
zona and New Mexico are typical of all the flat 
countries lying up from the deserts ; and yet 
there are many tracts of small acreage in this 
same region that show distinctly different feat- 
ures. Sometimes there are small beds of flat 
alkali dust, sometimes beds of soda and gypsum, 
sometimes beds of salt. Then occasionally there 
is a broad plain sown broadcast far and wide 
with blocks of lava — the remnants of a great 
lava-stream sent forth many centuries ago ; and 
again flat reaches strewn thick with blocks of 
porphyry that have been washed down from the 
mountains no one knows just when or how. 
You are always riding into the unexpected in 
these barren countries, stumbling upon strange 
phenomena, seeing strange sights. 

And yet as you ascend from the valley of the 
Colorado moving to the northeast, the lands 
and the sights become even stranger. For now 
you are rising to the Great Plateau and the 
Grand Canyon country — the region of the butte, 



MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



199 



the vast escarpment, the dome, the cliff, the 
gorge. It is a more mountainous land than 
that lying to the south, and it is deeper cut 
with river-beds and canyons. Yet still you 
have no trouble in finding even here the flat 
spaces peculiar to all the desert-bordering ter- 
ritory. There are grease wood plains as at the 
south and great bare benches that seem endless 
in their sweep. There are, too, spaces covered 
with lava-blocks and beds of soda and salt. 
More rain falls here than at the south or west ; 
and in certain sections the grass grows rank, the 
yuccas become trees, and higher up toward Ash 
Fork the hills are covered with a growth of juni- 
per. Flowers and shrubs are more abundant, 
birds and animals come and go across your path- 
way, and there are green valleys with water 
running upon the surface of the ground. And 
yet not twenty miles from the green valley you 
may enter upon the most barren plain imagi- 
nable — a place like the Painted Desert, perhaps, 
where in spots not a living thing of any kind is 
seen, where there is nothing but dry rock in the 
mountains and dry dust in the valley. These 
areas of utter desolation are of frequent enough 
occurrence in all the regions lying immediately 
to the north and the east of the Mojave to re- 



The Grand 

Canyon 

country. 



Hills 

covered with 
juniper. 



The Painted 
Desert. 



200 



THE DESERT 



Riding on 
the mesas. 



The rever- 
sion to 
savagery. 



The thin 
air again. 



mind you that you are still in a desert land, and 
that the bench and the arid plain are really a 
part of the great waste itself. 

Nature never designed more fascinating coun- 
try to ride over than these plains and mesas 
lying up and back from the desert basin. You 
may be alone without necessarily being lone- 
some. And everyone rides here with the feel- 
ing that he is the first one that ever broke into 
this unknown land, that he is the original dis- 
coverer ; and that this new world belongs to 
him by right of original exploration and con- 
quest. Life becomes simplified from necessity. 
It begins all over again, starting at the primitive 
stage. There is a reversion to the savage. Civ- 
ilization, the race, history, philosophy, art — 
how very far away and how very useless, even 
contemptible, they seem. What have they to do 
with the air and the sunlight and the vastness of 
the plateau ! Nature and her gift of buoyant life 
are overpowering. The joy of mere animal ex- 
istence, the feeling that it is good to be alive 
and face to face with Nature's self, drives every- 
thing else into the background. 

And what air one breathes on these plains — 
what wonderful air ! It is exhilarating to the 
whole body ; it brightens the senses and sweet- 



MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



201 



ens the mind and quiets the nerves. And how 
clear it is ! Leagues away needle and spine and 
mountain-ridge still come out clear cut against 
the sky. Is it the air alone that makes possible 
such far-away visions, or has the light somewhat 
to do with it ? What penetrating, all-pervad- 
ing, wide-spread light ! How silently it falls 
and how like a great mirror the plain reflects it 
back to heaven ! 

Light and air — what means wherewith to 
conjure up illusions and deceive the senses ! 
We think we see far away a range of low hills, 
but, as we ride on, buttes and lomas seem to 
detach and come toward us. There is no range 
ahead of us ; there are only scattered groups of 
hills many miles apart. Far away to the left 
on a little rise of ground is a wild horse watch- 
ing us, his head high in air, his nostrils sniffing 
for our scent upon the breeze. How colossal he 
seems ! Doubtless he is the last of some upland 
band, the leader of the troop who through great 
size and strength was best fitted to survive. 
But no ; he is only a common little Indian 
pony distorted to huge proportions by the heat- 
ed atmosphere. We are riding into the sunset. 
Ahead of us every notch in the hills, every little 
valley has a shaft of golden light streaming 



Tlie light 
and its 
deceptions. 



Distorted 
proportions. 



202 



THE DESERT 



Changed 
colors. 



The little 
hills. 



Painting 
the desert. 



through it. But turn in your saddle and look 
to the east, and the hills we have left behind 
us are surrounded by veilings of lilac. Again 
the omnipresent desert air ! We see the 
western hills as through an amber glass, but 
looking to the east the glass is changed to pale 
amethyst. 

How delicately beautiful are the hills that 
seem to gather in little groups along the waste ! 
They are not sharp-edged in their ridges like 
the higher mountains. Wind, rain, and sand 
have done their work upon them until there is 
hardly a rough feature left to them. All their 
lines are smooth and flow from one into another ; 
and all the parti-colors of their rocks and soils 
are blended into one tone by the light and the 
air. With surfaces that catch and reflect light, 
and little depressions that hold shadows, how 
very picturesque they are ! Indeed as you 
watch them breaking the horizon-line you are 
surprised to see how easily they compose into 
pictures. If you tried to put them upon can- 
vas your surprise would probably be greater to 
find how very little you could make of them. 
The desert is not more pain table than the Alps. 
Both are too big. 

These hills — they are usually called lomas — 



MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



203 



that one meets with in the plateau region are 
not of the same make-up as the clay buttes of 
Wyoming or the gravel hills of New England. 
They have a core of rock within them and are 
nothing less than washed-down foot-hills. You 
will often see a chain of them receding from the 
range toward the plain, and growing smaller as 
they recede, until the last one is a mound only 
a few feet in height. They are flattening down 
to the level of the plain — sinking into the 
sandy sea. 

Usually the lomas are seen against a back- 
ground of dark mountains of which they are 
or have been at one time a constituent part. 
For the lomas are the outliers from the foot- 
hills as the foot-hills from the mountains proper. 
They are the most worn because they are the 
lowest down in the valley — in fact the bottom 
steps which receive not only their own wash but 
that of all the other steps besides. The moun- 
tains pour their waters and loose stones upon 
the foot-hills, the foot-hills cast them off upon 
the lomas, and the lomas in turn thrust them 
upon the plains. But the casting off effort be- 
comes weaker at each step as the sides of the 
hill become less of a declivity. When the little 
hill is reached the sand-wash settles about the 



Worn-down 
mountains. 



The moun- 
tain-ivash 
and its 
effect. 



204 



THE DESERT 



Flattening 
down to tJte 
plain. 



Mountain- 
making. 



The 
foot-hills. 



. and in time the whole mass rises on its 
sides and sinks somewhat in the centre, until 
a mere rise of ground is all that remains. So 
perish the hills that we are accustomed to speak 
of as " everlasting." It is merely another illus- 
tration of Nature's method in the universe. 
She is as careless of the individual hill or moun- 
tain as of the individual man, animal, or flower. 
All are beaten into dust. But the species is 
more enduring, better preserved. Year by year 
Nature is tearing down, washing down, palling 
to pieces range after range ; but year by year 
she is also heaving up stupendous mountains 
like the Alps, and crackling with a mighty 
squeeze the earth's crust into the ridges of the 
Rockies and the Andes. 

The foot-hills are just what their name indi- 
cates — the hills that lie at the foot of the moun- 
tains. They are not usually detached from the 
main range like so many of the lomas, but are a 
part of it ; and while not exactly the buttresses 
of the mountains, yet they remind one of those 
architectural supports of cathedral walls. The 
foot-hills themselves are perhaps as firmly sup- 
ported as the mountains for very often they 
stretch down from the mountains in a long 
ridge like a spine, and from the spine are 



MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



205 



thrown out supporting ribs that trail away into 
the valleys. In a granite country these foot- 
hills are usually very smooth, and are made up 
largely, as regards their surfaces, of the grit and 
grind of the rocks. The rocks themselves are 
usually wind worn, rounded by rain and sand, 
and sometimes fantastic in shape. Often the 
soft granite wears through in seams and leaves 
lozcnge-like blocks linked together like beads 
upon a string ; often the whole rock-crown of 
the hill is honey-combed by the wind until it 
looks as soft as a sponge. The foot-hills of 
porphyry are more jagged and rough in every 
way. The stone is much harder and while it 
splits like granite and falls along the mountain- 
side in a talus it does not readily disintegrate. 
The last bit of it remains a hard kernel, and 
the porphyry foot-hill is usually a keen-edged 
mountain in miniature. 

The hills have a desert vegetation of grease 
wood, cactus, and sage, with occasional trees like 
the palo verde and the lluvia d'oro ; but their 
general appearance is not very different from 
the mesas. Where the altitude is high — say 
five thousand feet and over — there may be a 
more radical change in vegetation ; for now the 
oak begins to appear, and if it is open country 



Forms of 
the foot- 
hills. 



Mountain- 
plants. 



206 



THE DESERT 



Bare 
mountains. 



The 

southern 

exposures. 



the grasses and flowers show everywhere. Some- 
times the foot-hills are covered with a dense 
chaparral made up of many low trees and 
bushes ; but this growth is more peculiar to 
the Californian hills west of the Coast Range 
than to Arizona. Many of the ranges in the 
Canyon country are almost as bare of vegeta- 
tion as an ancient lake-bed. And sometimes 
altitude seems to have little to do with the 
kinds of growths. Cacti and the salt-bush 
flourish at six thousand feet as readily as down 
in the Salton Basin three hundred feet below 
sea-level. The most dangerous and difficult 
thing to set up about anything in this desert 
world is the general law or common rule. The 
exception — the thing that is perhaps uncom- 
mon — comes up at every turn to your un- 
doing. 

Even the mountains of Arizona that have an 
elevation of from five to eight thousand feet 
are often quite bare of timber. The sahuaro, 
the nopal, the palo verde may grow to their 
very peaks and still make only a scanty cover- 
ing. Seen from a distance the southern ex- 
posure of the mountain looks perfectly bare ; 
but if you travel around it to the north side 
where the sunlight does not fall except for a 



MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



207 



few hours of the day, yon will find a growth of 
bushes, small trees, vines, and grasses that, tak- 
en together, form something of a thicket — that 
is for a desert. And here, too, on the northern 
exposure you will find the abrupt walls of the 
peak stained with great fields of orange and 
gray lichens that lend a color quality to the 
whole top. 

But through the bushes and grasses and 
lichens the wine-red of the porphyry comes 
cropping out to tell you that the mountain is a 
mass of rock, that it holds little or no soil on 
its sides, that it has not a suspicion of water ; 
and that whatever grows upon it, does so, not 
by favor of circumstance, but through sheer 
desert stubbornness. The vegetation is a thin 
disguise that is penetrated in a few moments. 
The arid character of the mountain says plainly 
enough that we are not yet out of the region 
of sands and burning winds and fiery sun-shafts. 
The whole of the Arizona country as far east 
as the Continental Divide, in spite of its occa- 
sional green valleys and few high mountain- 
ranges with timbered tops, is a slope leading 
up and out from the desert by gradual if broken 
steps which we have called mesas or benches. 
It is a bare, dry land. Its name would imply 



Gray 

lichens. 



Still in the 

desert 

region. 



208 



THE DESEET 



Arida zona. 



Cloud- 
bursts on 
the mesas. 



The wash of 
rains. 



that the early Spaniards had found it that and 
called it arida zona for cause.* 

Yet at times it is a land of heavy cloud-bursts 
and wash-outs. In the summer months it fre- 
quently rains on the mesas in torrents. The 
hare surface of the country drains this water al- 
most like the roof of a house because there are 
no grasses or bushes of consequence to check 
the water and allow it to soak into the ground. 
The descent from the Divide to the Colorado 
Kiver is quite steep. The flood of waters rushes 
down the steps of the mesas and over the bare 
ground with terrific force. It quickly cuts 
channels in the low places down which are 
hurled sand, gravel, and bowlders. The cutting 
of the channel during the heavy rains is some- 
thing extraordinary, partly because the stream 
has great volume and fall, and partly because 
the channel-bed is usually of soft rock and easily 
cut. In a few dozen years the arroyo of a mesa 
that carries off the water from the mountain- 
range has cut a river-bed many feet deep ; in a 

* The late Dr. Elliot Coues and others reject the obvi- 
ous arida zona of the Spanish in favor of some strained 
etymologies from the Indian dialects, about which no two 
of them agree. Why should the name not have come 
from the Spanish, and why should it not mean just sim- 
ply arid zone or belt ? 



MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



209 



few hundred years the valley-bed changes into 
a gorge with five hundred feet of sheer rock- 
wall ; in a few thousand years perhaps the rest- 
less wearing water of the great river has sunk 
its bed five thousand feet below the surface and 
made the Grand Canyon of the Colorado. 

The Canyon country is well named, for it has 
plenty of wash-outs and gorges. Almost any- 
where among the mountain-ranges you can find 
them — not Grand Canyons, to be sure, but ones 
of size sufficient to be impressive without being 
stupendous. Walls of upright rock several hun- 
dred feet in height have enough bulk and body 
about them to impress anyone. The mass is 
really overpowering. It is but the crust of 
the earth exposed to view ; but the gorge at Ni- 
agara and the looming shaft of the Matterhorn 
are not more. The imagination strains at such 
magnitude. And all the accessories of the 
gorge and canyon have a might to them that 
adds to the general effect. The sheer precipices, 
the leaning towers, the pinnacles and shafts, the 
recesses and caves, the huge basins rounded 
out of rock by the waterfalls are all touched 
by the majesty of the sublime. 

And what could be more beautiful than the 
deep shadow of the canyon ! You may have 



Gorge 
cutting. 



In the 
canyons. 



Upright 
walls of 
rock. 



210 



THE DESERT 



Color in 

canyon 

shadows. 



The blue sky 
seen from 
the canyon 
depths. 



had doubts about those colored shadows which 
painters of the plein-air school talked so much 
about a few years ago. You may have thought 
that it was all talk and no reality ; but now that 
you are in the canyon, and in a shadow, look 
about you and see if there is not plenty of color 
there, too. The walls are dyed with it, the 
stones are stained with it — all sorts of colors 
from strata of rock, from clays and slates, from 
minerals, from lichens, from mosses. The 
stones under your feet have not turned black 
or brown because out of the sunlight. If you 
were on the upper rim of the canyon looking 
down, the whole body of air in shadow would 
look blue. And that strange light coming from 
above ! You may have had doubts, too, about 
the intense luminosity of the blue sky ; but look 
up at it along the walls of rock to where it 
spreads in a thin strip above the jaws of the 
canyon. Did you ever see such light coming 
out of the blue before ! See how it flashes from 
the long line of tumbling water that pitches over 
the rocks ! White as an avalanche, the water 
slips through the air down to its basin of stone ; 
and white, again, as the snow are the foam and 
froth of the pool. 

Stones and water in a gorge, wastes of rock 



MESAS AND FOOT-HILLS 



211 



thrust upward into mountains, long vistas of 
plain and mesa glaring in the sunlight — what 
things are these for a human being to fall in 
love with ? Doctor Johnson, who occasionally 
went into the country to see his friends, but 
never to see the country, who thought a man 
demented who enjoyed living out of town ; and 
who cared for a tree only as firewood or lum- 
ber, what would he have had to say about the 
desert and its confines ? In his classic time, 
and in all the long time before him, the earth 
and the beauty thereof remained comparatively 
unnoticed and unknown. Scott, Byron, Hugo, 
— not one of the old romanticists ever knew 
Nature except as in some strained way symbolic 
of human happiness or misery. Even when the 
naturalists of the last half of the nineteenth 
century took up the study they were impressed 
at first only with the large and more apparent 
beauties of the world — the Alps, the Niagaras, 
the Grand Canyons, the panoramic views from 
mountain-tops. They never would have tol- 
erated the desert for a moment 

But the Nature-lover of the present, who has 
taken so kindly to the minor beauties of the 
world, has perhaps a little wider horizon than 
his predecessors. Not that his positive knowl- 



Desert 
landscape. 



The former 
knowledge 
of Nature. 



212 



THE DESERT 



The Nature- 
lover of the 
present. 



Human 
limitations. 



edge is so much greater, but rather where he 
lacks in knowledge he declines to condemn. 
He knows now that Nature did not give all her 
energy to the large things and all her weakness 
to the small things; he knows now that she 
works by law and labors alike for all ; he knows 
now that back of everything is a purpose, and 
if he can discover the purpose he cannot choose 
but admire the product. 

That is something of an advance no doubt — 
a grasp at human limitations at least — but there 
is no reason to think that it will lead to any 
lofty heights. Nature never intended that we 
should fully understand. That we have stum- 
bled upon some knowledge of her laws was more 
accident than design. We have by some strange 
chance groped our way to the Gate of the Gar- 
den, and there we stand, staring through the 
closed bars, with the wonder of little children. 
Alas ! we shall always grope ! And shall we 
ever cease to wonder ? 



CHAPTEE XII 
MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 

The character of the land lying along the 
western boundaries of the deserts is very differ- 
ent from that of the Arizona canyon country. 
Moving toward the Pacific you meet with no 
mesas of consequence, nor do you traverse many 
plateaus or foot-hills. The sands extend up to 
the bases of the Coast Eange and then stop 
short. The mountains rise abruptly from the 
desert like a barrier or wall. Sometimes they 
lift vertically for several thousand feet, but 
more often they present only a steep rough 
grade. There are cracks in the wall called 
passes, through which railways lead on to the 
Pacific ; and there are high divides and saddles 
— dips in the top of the wall — through which in 
the old days the Indians trailed from desert to 
sea, and which are to-day known only to the 
inquisitive few. 

From the saddles — and better still from the 
topmost peaks — there are wonderful sights to 
213 



The western 
mountains. 



Saddles and 
passes. 



214 



THE DESERT 



The view 
from the 
mountain- 
top. 



Looking up 
toward the 
peak. 



be seen. Yon will never know the vast reach 
of the deserts until you see them from a point 
of rock ten thousand feet in air. Then you are 
standing on the Eim of the Bowl and can see 
the yellow ocean of sand within and the blue 
ocean of water without. The ascent to that 
high point is, however, not easy, especially if 
undertaken from the desert side. But nothing 
could be more interesting in quick change and 
new surprise than the rise from the hot waste 
at the bottom to the cold white-capped peaks of 
the top. It is not often that you find moun- 
tains with their feet thrust into tropic sands 
and their heads thrust into clouds of snow. 

Before you start to climb, before you reach 
the foot of the mountains, you are struck by 
the number of dry washes leading down from 
the sides and gradually losing themselves in the 
sands. As the eyes trace these arroyos up the 
mountain-side they are seen to turn into green 
streaks and finally, near the peak, into white 
streaks. You know what that means and yet 
can hardly believe that those white lines are 
snow-banks packed many feet deep in the can- 
yons ; that from them run streams which 
lower down become green lines because of the 
;, bushes, and trees growing on their 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



215 



banks ; and that finally the streams, after 
plunging through canyons, fall into the arroyos 
and are drunk up by the desert sands before 
they have left the mountain-bases. It seems 
incredible that a stream should be born ; run its 
course through valley, gorge, and canyon ; and 
then disappear forever in the sands, all within 
a few miles. Yet not one but many of these 
mountain-streams have that brief history. 

And at one time they must have been larger, 
or there were slips of glaciers or avalanches on 
the mountains ; for the arroyos are piled with 
great blocks of granite and there are rows of 
bowlders on either side which might have been 
rolled there by floods or pushed there by an ice- 
sheet. As you draw nearer, the bowlders crop 
out in large fields and beds. They surround 
the rock bases like a deposit rather than a talus, 
and over them one must pass on his way up the 
mountain-side. 

If you ascend by the bed of the arroyo it is 
not long before you begin to note the presence 
of underground water. It is apparent in the 
green of the vegetation. The grasses are seen 
growing first in bunches and then in sods, 
little blue flowers are blooming beside the 
grasses ; alders, willows, and young sycamores 



Lost 
streams. 



Avalanches 
and bowl- 
der-beds. 



The ascent 
by the 
arroyo. 



216 



THE DESEKT 



Growth of 
the stream. 



Rising 
banks. 



Waterfalls. 



are growing along the banks, and live-oaks are 
in the stream-bed among the bowlders. As yon 
move np and into the monntain the bed be- 
comes more of a rocky floor, the earth-deposits 
grow thinner, and presently little water-pockets 
begin to show themselves. At first yon see 
them in pot-holes and worn basins in the rock, 
then water begins to show in small pools nnder 
cnt banks, and then perhaps there is a little 
glassy slip of light over a flat rock in a narrow 
section of the bed. Gradually the slip grows in 
length and joins the pools, nntil at last yon 
see the stream come to life, as it were, ont of 
the gronnd. 

The banks begin to rise. As yon advance 
they lift higher and higher, they grow into 
abrnpt walls of rock ; the strata of granite crop 
ont in ragged ledges. The trees and grasses 
disappear, and in their place come cold pale 
flowers growing ont of beds of moss, or cling- 
ing in rock-niches where all aronnd the gray 
and orange lichens are weaving tapestries npon 
the walls. The bed of the stream seems to have 
snnken down, bnt in reality it is rising by steps 
and falls ever increasing in size. The stream 
itself has grown mnch larger, swifter, more 
noisy. Yon move slowly np and aronnd the 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



217 



falls, each one harder to surmount than the last, 
until finally you are in the canyon. 

The walls are high, the air is damp, the light 
is dim. The glare and heat of the desert have 
vanished and in their place is the shadow of the 
cave. You toil on far up the chasm, creeping 
along ledges and rising by niches, until a great 
pool, a basin hewn from the rock, is before 
you ; and the hewer is seen waving and flash- 
ing in the air a hundred feet as it falls into the 
pool. Around you and ahead of you is a sheer 
pitch of rock curved like a horseshoe. It is 
insurmountable ; there is no thoroughfare. 
You will not gain the peak by way of the can- 
yon. The water-ousel on the basin edge — sole 
tenant of the gorge — seems to laugh at your ig- 
norance of that fact. Let us turn back and try 
the ridges. 

Up the faces of the spurs and thus by the 
backbones and saddles to the summit is not 
easy travelling. At first desert vegetation sur- 
rounds you, for the cacti and all their compan- 
ions creep up the mountain-side as far as possi- 
ble. The desert does not give up its dominion 
easily. Bowlders are everywhere, vines and 
grasses are growing under their shade ; and, as 
you advance, the bushes arise and gradually 



In the 
gorge. 



The ascent 
by the 
ridges. 



218 



THE DESERT 



The 
chaparral. 



Home of the 
grizzly. 



Ridge trails 
and taluses. 



thicken into brush, and the brush runs into a 
chaparral. The manzanita, the lavender, and 
white lilac, the buckthorn, the laurel, the su- 
mac, all throw out stiff dry arms that tear at 
your clothing. The mountain-covering that 
from below looked an ankle-deep of grasses and 
weeds — a velvety carpet only — turns out to be 
a dense tangle of brush a dozen feet high. It 
is not an attractive place because the only suc- 
cessful method of locomotion through it is on 
the hands and knees. That method of moving 
is peculiar to the bear, and so for that matter 
is the chaparral through which you are tearing 
your way. It is one of the hiding-places of the 
grizzly. And there are plenty of grizzlies still 
left in the Sierra Madre. To avoid the chapar- 
ral (and also the bear) you would better keep 
on the sunny side of the spurs where the 
ground is more open. 

You are at the top of one of the outlying spurs 
at last and you find there a dim trail made by 
deer and wolves leading along the ridge, across 
the saddle, and up to the next spur. As you 
follow this you presently emerge from the brush 
and come face to face with a declivity, covered 
by broken blocks of stone that seem to have 
been slipping down the mountain-side for cen- 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



219 



tnries. It is an old talus of one of the spurs. 
You wind about it diagonally until different 
ground is reached, and then you are once more 
upon a ridge — higher by a spur than before. 

Again the scene changes. An open park- 
like country appears covered with tall grass, 
the sunlight flickers on the shiny leaves of live- 
oaks, and dotted here and there are tall yuccas 
in bloom — the last of the desert growths to 
vanish from the scene. Flowers strange to the 
desert are growing in the grass — clumps of yel- 
low violets, little fields of pink alfileria, purple 
lilies, purple nightshades, red paint-brushes, 
and flaming fire-rods. And there are birds in the 
trees that know the desert only as they fly — blue 
birds with red breasts as in New England, blue- 
jays with their chatter as in Minnesota, blue- 
backed woodpeckers with their tapping on dead 
limbs as in Pennsylvania. And here was once 
the stamping-ground of the mule-deer. Here 
in the old days under the shade of the live-oak 
he would drowse away the heat of the day and 
at night perhaps step down to the desert. He 
was safe then in the open country, but to-day 
he knows danger and skulks in the depths of 
the chaparral, from which a hound can scarcely 
drive him. 



Among the 
live-oaks. 



Birds and 
deer. 



220 



THE DESERT 



Yawning 
canyons. 



The canyon 
stream. 






Onward and upward through the oaks until 
you are on the top of another ridge. Did you 
think it was the top because it hid the peak ? 
Ah no ; the granite crags are still far above 
you. And there, yawning at your very feet, is 
another canyon whose existence you never sus- 
pected. How steep and broad and ragged the 
walls look to you ! And down in the bottom 
of the canyon — almost a mile down it seems — 
are huge masses of rock, fallen towers and 
ledges, great frost-heaved strata lying piled in 
confusion among trees and vines and heavy 
brush. Here and there down the canyon's 
length appear disconnected flashes of silvery 
light showing where a stream is dashing its 
way under rocks and through tangled brush 
down to the sandy sea. And far above you to 
the right where the canyon heads is a streak of 
dirty-looking snow. There is nothing for it 
but to get around the head of the canyon above 
the snow-streak, for crossing the canyon itself 
is unprofitable, not to say impossible. 

How odd it seems after the sands to see the 
snow. The long wedge lying in the barranca 
under the shadowed lee of an enormous spur is 
not very inviting looking. It has melted down 
and accumulated dust and dirt until it looks al- 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



221 



most like a bed of clay. But the little stream 
running away from its lowest part is pure ; and 
it dashes through the canyon, tumbles into little 
pools, and slips over shelving precipices like a 
thing of life. Could the canyon have been cut 
out of the solid rock by that little stream ? Who 
knows ! Besides, the stream is not always so 
small. The descent is steep, and bowlders car- 
ried down by great floods cut faster than water. 
It is dangerous travelling — this crossing of 
snow-banks in June. You never know how 
soft they may be nor how deep they may drop 
you. Better head the snow-bank no matter how 
much hard brush and harder stones there may 
be to fight against. The pines are above you 
and they are beginning to appear near you. Be- 
side you is a solitary shaft of dead timber, its 
branches wrenched from it long ago and its 
trunk left standing against the winds. And on 
the ground about you there are fallen trunks, 
crumbled almost to dust, and near them young 
pines springing up to take the place of the fallen. 
Manzanita and buckthorn and lilac are here, 
too ; but the chaparral is not so dense as lower 
down. You pass through it easily and press on 
upward, still upward, in the cool mountain-air, 
until you are above the barranca of snow and un- 



The wear of 
water. 



The pines. 



222 



THE DESERT 



Barrancas 
and escarp- 
ments. 



Under 
the pines. 



Bushes, 
ferns, and 



der the lee of a vast escarpment. The wall is 
perpendicular and yon have to circle it looking 
for an exit higher np. For half an hour you 
move across a talus of granite blocks, and then 
through a break in the wall you clamber up to 
the top of the escarpment. You are on a high 
spur which leads up a pine-clad slope. You are 
coming nearer your quest. 

The pines ! — at last the pines ! How gigan- 
tic they seem, those trees standing so calm and 
majestic in their mantles of dark green — how 
gigantic to eyes grown used to the little palo 
verde or the scrubby grease wood ! All classes 
of pines are here — sugar pines, bull pines, white 
pines, yellow pines — not in dense numbers 
standing close together as in the woods of Ore- 
gon, but scattered here and there with open 
aisles through which the sunshine falls in broad 
bars. Many small bushes — berry bushes most 
of them — are under the pines ; and with them 
are grasses growing in tufts, flowers growing in 
beds, and bear- clover growing in fields. Aimless 
and apparently endless little streams wander 
everywhere, and ferns and mosses go with them. 
Bowlder streams they are, for the rounded bowl- 
der is still in evidence — in the stream, on the 
bank, and under the roots of the pine. 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



223 



The beautiful mountain-quail loves to scram- 
ble over these stones, especially when they are 
in the water ; and the mountain-quail is here. 
This is his abiding-place, and you are sure to 
see him, for he has a curiosity akin to that of 
the antelope and must get on a bowlder or a log 
to look at you. And this is the home of hun- 
dreds of woodpeckers that seem to spend their 
entire lives in pounding holes in the pine-trees 
and then pounding acorns into the holes. It 
is a very thrifty practice and provides against 
winter consumption, only the squirrels consume 
the greater part of the acorns if the blue-jays 
do not get ahead of them. For here lives the 
ordinary blue-jay and also his mountain cousin, 
the crested jay, with a coat so blue that it might 
better be called indigo. A beautiful bird, but 
with a jangling note that rasps the air with dis- 
cord. His chief occupation seems to be climb- 
ing pine-trees as by the rungs of a ladder. 
There are sweeter notes from the warblers, the 
nuthatches, and the chickadees. But no desert- 
bird comes up so high ; and as for the common 
lawn and field birds like the robin and the 
thrush, they do not fancy the pines. 

Upward, still upward, under the spreading 
arms of the pines ! How silent the forest save 



Mountain- 
quail. 



Indigo jays. 



Warblers. 



224 



THE DESERT 



The moun- 
tain-air. 



The dwarf 
pine. 



The 
summit. 



for the soughing of the wind through the pine 
needles and the jangle of the jays ! And how 
thin and clear the mountain-air ! How white the 
sunlight falling upon the moss-covered rocks ! It 
must be that we have risen out of the dust- 
laden atmosphere of the desert. And out of 
its heat too. The air feels as though blown to 
us from snow-banks, and indeed, they are in the 
gullies lying on either side of us. For now we 
are coming close to the peak. The bushes have 
been dwindling away for some time past, and 
the pines have been growing thinner in body, 
fewer in number, smaller in size. A dwarf pine 
begins to show itself — a scraggly tempest-fight- 
ing tree, designed by Nature to grow among the 
bowlders of the higher peaks and to be the first 
to stop the slides of snow. The hardy grasses 
fight beside it, and with them is the little snow- 
bird, fighting for life too. 

Upward, still upward, until great spaces be- 
gin to show through the trees and the ground 
flattens and becomes a floor of rock. In the 
barrancas on the north side the snow still lies in 
banks, but on the south side, where the sun falls 
all day, the ground is bare. You are now above 
the timber line. Nothing shows but wrecked 
and shattered strata of rock with patches of 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



225 



stunted grass. The top is only barren stone. 
The uppermost peak, which yon have perhaps 
seen from the desert a hundred miles away look- 
ing like a sharp spine of granite shot up in the 
air, turns out to be something more of a dome 
than a spine — a rounded knob of gray granite 
which you have no difficulty in ascending. 

At last you are on the peak and your first 
impulse is to look down. But no. Look up ! 
You have read and heard many times of the 
" deep blue sky." It is a stock phrase in nar- 
rative and romance ; but I venture to doubt if 
you have ever seen one. It is seen only from 
high points — from just such a place as you are 
now standing upon. Therefore look up first of 
all and see a blue sky that is turning into violet. 
Were you ten thousand feet higher in the air 
you would see it darkened to a purple-violet 
with the stars even at midday shining through 
it. How beautiful it is in color and how won- 
derful it is in its vast reach ! The dome in- 
stead of contracting as you rise into it, seems to 
expand. There are no limits to its uttermost 
edge, no horizon lines to say where it begins. 
It is not now a cup or cover for the world, but 
something that reaches to infinity — something 
in which the world floats. 



The look 
upward at 
the sky. 



The dark- 
blue dome. 



226 



THE DESEET 



White light. 



Distant 

views. 



The Pacific. 



And do yon notice that the snn is no longer 
yellow bnt white, and that the light that comes 
from it is cold with jnst the faintest shade of 
violet abont it ? The air, too, is changed. 
Look at the far-away ridges and peaks, some of 
them snow-capped, bnt the majority of them 
bare ; and see the air how bine and pnrple it 
looks along the tops and abont the slopes. Peak 
npon peak and chain npon chain disappear to 
the north and sonth in a mysterious veil of gray, 
blue, and pnrple. Green pine-clad spnrs of the 
peaks, green slopes of the peaks themselves, 
keep fading away in bine - green mazes and 
hazes. Look down into the canyons, into the 
shadowed depths where the air lies packed in a 
mass, and the top of the mass seems to reflect 
purple again. This is a very different air from 
the glowing mockery that dances in the basin 
of Death Valley. It is mountain-air and yet 
has something of the sea in it. Even at this 
height you can feel the sea-breezes moving along 
the western slopes. For the ocean is near at 
hand — not a hundred miles away as the crow 
flies. From the mountain-top it looks like a 
flat blue band appended to the lower edge of 
the sky, and it counts in the landscape only as 
a strip of color or light. 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



227 



Between the ocean and the mountain yon are 
standing upon lies the habitable portion of 
Southern California, spread out like a relief 
map with its broken ranges, its chaparral-cov- 
ered foot-hills, and its wide valleys. How fair 
it looks lying under the westering sun with 
the shadows drawing in the canyons, and the 
valleys glowing with the yellow light from 
fields of ripened barley ! And what a con- 
trast to the yellow of the grain are the dark 
green orchards of oranges and lemons scat- 
tered at regular intervals like the squares of 
a checker-board ! And what pretty spots of 
light and color on the map are the orchards 
of prunes, apricots, peaches, pears, the patches 
of velvety alfalfa, the groves of eucalyptus and 
Monterey cypress, the long waving green lines 
of cottonwoods and willows that show where 
run the mountain-streams to the sea ! 

Yet large as they are, these are only spots. 
The cultivated portion of the land is but a 
flower-garden beside the unbroken foot-hills 
and the untenanted valleys. As you look down 
upon them the terra-cotta of the granite 
shows through the chaparral of the hills ; and 
the sands of the valleys have the glitter of the 
desert. You know intuitively that all this 



Southern 
California. 



The garden 
in the 
desert. 



228 



THE DESERT 



Reclaiming 
the valleys. 



Fighting 
fertility. 



country was planned by Nature to be desert. 
Down to the water-edge of the Pacific she once 
carried the light, air, and life of the Mojave 
and the Colorado. 

But man has in measure changed the desert 
conditions by storing the waste waters of the 
mountains and reclaiming the valleys by irriga- 
tion. His success has been phenomenal. Out 
of the wilderness there have sprung farms, 
houses, towns, cities with their wealth and lux- 
ury. But the cultivated conditions are main- 
tained only at the price of eternal vigilance. 
Nature is compelled to reap where she has not 
sown ; and at times she seems almost human in 
the way she rebels and recurs to former condi- 
tions. Two, three ; yes, at times, four years 
in succession she gives little rain. A great 
drouth follows. Then the desert breaks in 
upon the valley ranches, upon the fields of bar- 
ley, the orchards of prunes and peaches and 
apricots. Then abandoned farms are quite as 
plentiful as in New England ; and once aban- 
doned, but a few years elapse before the desert 
has them for its own. Nature is always driven 
with difficulty. Out on the Mojave she fights 
barrenness at every turn ; here in Southern 
California she fights fertility. She is deter- 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



229 



mined to maintain just so much of desert with 
just so much of its hardy, stubborn life. When 
she is pleased to enhance it or abate it she will 
do so ; but in her own good time and way. 

Come to the eastern side of the peak and 
look out once more upon the desert while yet 
there is time. The afternoon sun is driving 
its rays through the passes like the sharp-cut 
shafts of search-lights, and the shadows of the 
mountains are lengthening in distorted silhou- 
ette upon the sands below. Yet still the San 
Bernardino Range, leading off southeast to the 
Colorado River, is glittering with sunlight at 
every peak. You are above it and can see over 
its crests in any direction. The vast sweep of 
the Mojave lies to the north ; the Colorado 
with its old sea-bed lies to the south. Far 
away to the east you can see the faint forms of 
the Arizona mountains melting and mingling 
with the sky ; and in between lie the long pink 
rifts of the desert valleys and the lilac tracery 
of the desert ranges. 

What a wilderness of fateful buffetings ! 
All the elemental forces seem to have turned 
against it at different times. It has been swept 
by seas, shattered by earthquakes and volca- 
noes, beaten by winds and sands, and scorched 



TJie desert 
from the 
mountain- 
top. 



The great 
extent of the 
desert. 



The fateful 
wilderness. 



230 



THE DESEKT 



All shall 
perish. 






The death 
of worlds. 



by suns. Yet in spite of all it has endured. It 
remains a factor in Nature's plan. It main- 
tains its types and out of its desolation it brings 
forth increase that the species may not perish 
from the face of the earth. 

And yet in the fulness of time Nature de- 
signs that this waste and all of earth with it 
shall perish. Individual, type, and species, all 
shall pass away ; and the globe itself become as 
desert sand blown hither and yon through 
space. She cares nothing for the individual 
man or bird or beast ; can it be thought that 
she cares any more for the individual world ? 
She continues the earth-life by the death of the 
old and the birth of the new ; can it be thought 
that she deals differently with the planetary 
and stellar life of the universe ? Whence come 
the new worlds and their satellites unless from 
the dust of dead worlds compounded with the 
energy of nebulae ? Our outlook is limited in- 
deed, but have we not proof in our own moon 
that worlds do die ? Is it possible that its 
bleached body will never be disintegrated, will 
never dissolve and be resolved again into some 
new life ? And how came it to die ? What 
was the element that failed — fire, water, or at- 
mosphere ? Perhaps it was water. Perhaps it 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



231 



died through thousands of years with the slow 
evaporation of moisture and the slow growth of 
the — desert. 

Is then this great expanse of sand and rock 
the beginning of the end ? Is that the way our 
globe shall perish ? Who can say ? Nature 
plans the life, she plans the death ; it must be 
that she plans aright. For death may be the 
culmination of all character ; and life but the 
process of its development. If so, then not in 
vain these wastes of sand. The harsh destiny, 
the life-long struggle which they have imposed 
upon all the plants and birds and animals have 
been but as the stepping-stones of character. It 
is true that Nature taxed her invention to the 
utmost that each might not wage unequal strife. 
She gave cunning, artifice, persistence, strength ; 
she wished that each should endure and fulfil 
to its appointed time. But it is not the armor 
that develops the wearer thereof. It is the 
struggle itself — the hard friction of the fight. 
Not in the spots of earth where plenty breeds 
indolence do we meet with the perfected type. 
It is in the land of adversity, and out of much 
pain and travail that finally emerges the high- 
est manifestation. 

Not in vain these wastes of sand. And this 



The desert 
the begin- 
ning of the 
end? 



Develop- 
ment 
through 
adversity. 



232 



THE DESEBT 



Sublimity 
of tlie waste. 



Desolation 
and silence. 



time not because they develop character in des- 
ert life, but simply because they are beautiful 
in themselves and good to look upon whether 
they be life or death. In sublimity — the su- 
perlative degree of beauty — what land can equal 
the desert with its wide plains, its grim moun- 
tains, and its expanding canopy of sky ! You 
shall never see elsewhere as here the dome, the 
pinnacle, the minaret fretted with golden fire 
at sunrise and sunset ; you shall never see else- 
where as here the sunset valleys swimming in a 
pink and lilac haze, the great mesas and plateaus 
fading into blue distance, the gorges and can- 
yons banked full of purple shadow. Never 
again shall you see such light and air and color ; 
never such opaline mirage, such rosy dawn, such 
fiery twilight. And wherever you go, by land 
or by sea, you shall not forget that which you 
saw not but rather felt — the desolation and the 
silence of the desert. 

Look out from the mountain's edge once 
more. A dusk is gathering on the desert's face, 
and over the eastern horizon the purple shadow 
of the world is reaching up to the sky. The 
light is fading out. Plain and mesa are blurring 
into unknown distances, and mountain-ranges 
are looming dimly into unknown heights. Warm 



MOUNTAIN-BARRIERS 



233 



drifts of lilac-blue are drawn like mists across 
the valleys ; the yellow sands have shifted into 
a pallid gray. The glory of the wilderness has 
gone down with the snn. Mystery — that haunt- 
ing sense of the unknown — is all that remains. 
It is time that we should say good-night — per- 
haps a long good-night — to the desert. 



Good-nigkt 
to the 
desert. 



fl«Pt 28 wm 



SEP 7 1901 



